North Western Winds

NWW mooving to Wordpress

2006-07-30T14:35:00.000-07:00

I might as well make it official...

North Western Winds is moving to Wordpress fulltime.

You're all invited to visit me at:

http://northwesternwinds.wordpress.com/

Let's get things rolling!

Biblical Inerancy vs. Infallability

2006-07-15T11:19:00.000-07:00

Read my latest here.

New posts

2006-07-09T19:54:00.000-07:00

I am beginning to think seriously about making Wordpress my new home. If you are looking for new NWW material that will be the place to look - for now.

I still have a few questions to have answered before I commit, but I am leaning that way. In the meantime I'm learning by doing, and that means "doing" over there.

Wordpress

2006-07-02T11:57:00.000-07:00

My move to Mac has been very happy except for two issues - gaming and blogging. For websurfing and multimedia, a Mac is of course a terrific machine.

Games on the Mac platform are often ports of games made for the larger PC market and that means a Mac gamer will have to wait for the port. I'm not a heavy gamer by any means but I am very happy that the Mac port of Civilization 4 is finally here. Well, my copy isn't here quite yet - but it has been ordered and ought to be here soon.

The blogging issue is more complicated. I'm not fond of writing my posts in a browser window. This goes back to when I was first blogging and I lost one or two large posts into the ether. After that I moved to w.bloggar - a great little app that let me compose on my desktop and then click send when all was said and done. I have not been able to recreate that experience on my Mac, and not for a lack of trying! I looked at Marsedit, but that forces you to compse while staring at a bunch of HMTL code. No thanks, sometimes my own philosophical code is about all I can handle. I had high hopes of using the Mail program, which has a very nice interface. However - it generates a slew of formating code that plays havoc with my posts, and as the icing on the cake the links it creates disappear when posting. Performancing, the Firefox extention, is pretty slick, but is a browser window and that raises the save file isssue. I also looked at Nvu, the open source HTML composer that had it's origins in the Mozilla suite. That might be promising in the future but right now it's a bit slow and I don't know what information FTP blogger.com wants in order to let me use it.

There is also the issue of some frustration that I have had with blogger over the years - lost posts, template corruption and the like. I started to look around at other hosts and while I've made no decision yet, I find Wordpress intriguing. The templates look better to my eyes, and the posting / management interfce is certainly more sophisticated. Here is what I have created so far. I think it looks alright but it needs some images to give it some personality and life but I see no way to edit the template. I know some Wordpress blogs are customized but I suspect that these are running the software themselves. The documentation for Wordpress is extensive and I have not been able to sort this issue out yet and it is something that I need to resolve. If I move I plan to take my blogrolls with me and for that I'll need access to the template. At least, I think that's so.

I haven't yet tried using Mail to write to Wordpress. It would be great if that worked because in my efforts to use Mail I did manage to create an posting app with Automator. I suspect, however, that the browser window is the way of the future given all of the growth in web services we've seen in the last year.

Comments on Wordpress service would be most welcome. Perhaps someone can tell me why the Wordpress composer does not work in Safari or Camino, but does in Firefox. I know that Safari uses KHTML instead of Gecko, but Camino is Geko and it's no better.

Isn't technology grand!

Close the Windows on Eugenics

2006-06-29T16:37:00.000-07:00

Here is another reason to stay away from Windows software - as if you needed another. This came out after Warren Buffett anounced he would give Bill Gates' charity a mountain of money:

Fr. Thomas J. Euteneuer, president of Human Life International, issued a statement pointing out Buffett's track record of supporting pro-abortion organizations and related projects in the developing world. He reported that Buffett's foundation also gave a grant to the U.S.- based Center for Reproductive Rights, which fought bans on partial- birth abortion, and Catholics for a Free Choice. "The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have also given millions of dollars to organizations pushing abortion around the world," Fr. Euteneuer reported.

I have no idea why Gates and Buffett support the organizations they do, but I suspect it might be something along these lines:

Nature is astonishingly cruel. Science, by contrast, has the power of mercy. One can only be dazzled by the inventiveness and compassion of the scientists involved in this [embryonic] screening breakthrough... Admittedly genetic screening means that embryos carrying disabilities and diseases will be discarded. It is a stretch, however, to use the word destroyed, or even killed, as the test is done on embryos that are only three days old. And what is appealing about this early screening is that it offers the hope that, in the foreseeable future, abortion and late abortion will be less frequently used in dealing with serious defects and disabilities. It will be easier and better in every way to get rid of a tiny collection of cells. This is indeed playing God, as all the usual campaigners were quick to point out last week. But what on earth is wrong with humans playing God? I am all for it, especially as God doesn't seem to be doing it.

This sort of muddle headed bafflegab is such a sickly sweet confection that it seems brains are not an adequate defense against it. Minette Martin, who wrote this in the Times UK, seems to think that an abortion performed on a embryo three days old is somehow - she does not explain how - not an abortion. She neglects to say at what point an abortion is in fact an abortion, or how she arrived at her conclusions. She goes on to disparage disabled people who point out that they are quite happy to be alive, even if the nature of their existence troubles Martin's conscience. Martin, for her part, tries to escape her disabled critics by saying that she thinks no less of them but if they were less than three days old, she'd flush them down the toilet and never think twice about it. So much for intellect uber alles. The bedrock of Martin's argument lies in the claim about the non human nature of the three day old embryo, but this is not a claim built on science. Martin, if she was truly a critical thinker, would know this.

This essay on Critical Thinking today observes that:

... we teach science as a collection of facts and theories about a certain category of phenomena, rather than as a set of principles for understanding the world. A course in "Science, Pseudoscience, and Anti-science" would stimulate broader critical thought than the typical Chemistry 101 class. But the problem is deeper than this. Full-blown critical thinking is not coterminous with good scientific thinking. Critical thought is the principles of scientific thought projected to the far reaches of everyday life, with all the attendant demands and complications. This expansive generalization of the scientific method is hardly spontaneous or self-evident for most people. Just as learning the truth about Santa does not shatter the typical child's credulous worldview, learning the principles of science can easily fail to fully penetrate the larger vision of science students-and indeed, of scientists. By themselves, science classrooms are poor competition for the powerful obstacles to highly developed critical thinking that reside in human social life and in the wiring of the human brain. ... It is naive to expect social-science education, natural-science education, or education in general-at least in their present forms-to elevate critical thinking to something more than a pedagogical fashion that everyone applauds but few conceptualize very deeply. This leaves the skeptical community. We identify ourselves as champions of science and reason. But this is a broad mandate. We should avoid concentrating our skepticism too narrowly on the realms of superstition, pseudoscience, and the supernatural-for the ultimate challenge to a critical thinker is posed not by weird things but by insidiously mundane ones. If we hope to realize the promise of critical thought, it is important that skeptics affirm a multidimensional definition of critical thinking -- reasoning skills, skeptical worldview, values of a principled juror -- that exempts no aspect of social life.

This is all well and good. I endorse a good deal of what Howard Gabennesch has written here, and I'm heartened to see that he's broadened the circle of his criticism to include things that seem obvious, or which the culture has glommed onto. Unlike Gabennesch, however, I do not think there is a neutral ground from which to begin this process. One simply can't be skeptical about everything.To cite an obvious example in his essay, Gabennesch endorses Dawkins' three skeptical points:

1. Skeptics do not believe easily. They have outgrown childlike credulity to a greater extent than most adults ever do. 2. When skeptics take a position, they do so provisionally. They understand that their knowledge on any subject is fallible, incomplete, and subject to change. 3. Skeptics defer to no sacred cows. They regard orthodoxies as the mortal enemy of critical thought-all orthodoxies, including those that lie close to home.

Is there anything provisional in his endorsement of these points?

On the contrary, he is quite dogmatic in this "skeptic's orthodoxy". In number three especially, he's in the position of a doctor who needs to heal himself first. Since there is no obvious way to do this, I think it best to admit that one chooses to believe in capital T Truth and in rationality and all that is bundled up with it.

To bring us back to the beginning, one chooses to value human life. There is no intellectual proof for it. Because we choose to value human life, most of us would not agree to bomb a house if there might be someone inside it. Buffett, Gates and Martin have all avoided this non rational but still reasonable constraint by saying that they know the house is empty. Let's be real critical thinkers and ask how they know this to be true - ask them how it is that this is not a sacred cow or wishful thinking on their part. And if it is a sacred cow - one that competes with placing a high value on human life, why should we choose it when doing so places all of us at risk? A serious brain injury is not hard to come by.The stakes on this question are high. Let's not be hasty or sloppy in answering it; let's affirm that we stand behind one another as human beings. We hear it often enough, but the follow through is questionable. We need to be more critical not less, and really hear the arguments - even the one that gets maligned in most of the public press.

Little Big Town

2006-05-31T20:32:00.000-07:00

I've been vocal here about how much I like iTunes. It lead me to my first Mac, after all. And that's all good - I love my Mac, and I'm very fond of the entire iLife suite. I do have a growing gripe with the iTunes country music selection here in Canada, however. I know that Americans have a much better selection that we do here because somehow or other I once found myself logged in as a Yank. That allowed me to view a cornucopia of songs and videos that I had not seen available before (and which I could not download). Example... Little Big Town has been on the airwaves around here for months and for months I've been waiting to downlowd a copy of their second recording. What's worse is that I check for what's new fairly often and too often there's nothing at all, or something old. I love a lot of the oldies (Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys rocks the house) but not everything that's old is golden. A wider selection is a must going forward. Maybe the recent contract settlement with the some of the record labels will spur things along. If you haven't had the chance to check out Little Big Town yet, you can see them performing on this site at AOL. Check them out! Great harmonies and great songs! If you have time for only one song, make it "Boondocks." As of tonight, the record is visible on iTunes, but it has no content. With any luck that will be fixed very soon.

There's still no free lunch

2006-05-29T20:29:00.000-07:00

Here, Nicholas Carr explains why Google and Yahoo have an active interest in subsidizing the creation of free internet content:

The enforcers of the new model are the search-based ad-placement services, mainly, at the moment, Google and Yahoo. Their business comes down to scale - in particular, the overall scale of internet use. To expand the scale of use, they want to ensure that there's as much content as possible available on the internet for free. Think about it. Every piece of content - indeed, every service - on the internet is simply a complement to these companies' ad placement business (and the underlying search business). It's thus in their interest to drive the price of those complements down as far as possible, preferably to zero. Subscription pricing, and any other barrier to the free availability of online content and services, is anathema to them because it necessarily constrains the use of the internet. I am not criticizing these companies. I am simply pointing out that they are very powerful presences on the internet and that their core business turns all other web businesses into, in their view, complements that should be free. For Google and Yahoo, the so-called "gift economy" is indeed a gift.

This is, of course, why they fund programs like Performancing and services like Blogger.

Tanstaafl lives on, even in Web 2.0.

Performancing

2006-05-29T20:06:00.000-07:00

This is a test post to see how Mozzilla.org's new blogging extention for Firefox performs. It's called Performancing and it allows for posting from within Firefox. It works on the Mac just fine, even if it has an interface that is reminiscent of MS Word for Windows. My first impression is that this is a very good idea. It seems to be integrated with Technorati, allowing you to quickly pull up information about the current website - likely the one you're blogging about. There is also a tab for del icio us (which I don't use). If I could change one thing about this program, it would be to make the editor appear as a tab. As it stands now, it's awkward to get the composer window out of the way so that you can refer back to the web page at hand.

DVD libraries

2006-05-27T13:29:00.000-07:00

What sort of criteria do you use in forming a personal library of DVDs?

Do you think a library like that is a waste of time, since you only need to see a movie once? Or do you think a personal copy of your favourites might be a fun thing on a rainy night? If you have children a library for them might make good sense as a way to reduce rental costs and keep them away from less savoury fare. DVDs might also be useful to you as training materials, for excersize of language training, perhaps.

I don't fall into any of those categories, but I do think a few good choices are fun to have around the house. Here are some of the things I think about before making a purchase.

First, since I think this is a very frivolous purchase, it has to be cheap. Usually that will mean previously viewed copies that sell for well under $20 Canadian. Around $10 is the sweet spot, if I can get it.

Then, it has to be a movie that I think has a much better than average chance that I will sit down and watch it again. This is where things begin to get tricky.

What will lead me to watch a movie more than once? Certain genres are dead in the water as far as I'm concerned. Teen age comedies and horror flicks are to be avoided like the plague. So are musicals, because I simply hate them. There are very few well made comedies, so I'm seldom drawn in that direction.

Drama is my bread and butter, and there are two things above all that will make a film leap out for me. One is that the story simply has to be good, and not trite. Oh look, here's another film about the false idol of marriage and life in America. ** Snork **, whatever. American Beauty would be a stellar example. Crash is a better vehicle for this kind of tale it but has so much swearing in it that I would not want it in my house. Action movies tend to have very weak stories and be vehicles for stunt-work and effects; as a result they bore me to tears. Stories don't have to be original. Look, there are only so many story forms. What it must do is make me willing to overlook - or, if it is very good - to temporarily lose sight of the form.

Anytime we're dealing with film and moving images, we also expect those images to be at the very least interesting. Ideally they will be arresting. That doesn't mean bloody, explosive or sexual. Those things tend to make me feel exploited as a viewer, as if somehow this was the only way I could be captivated and entertained.

I like a film to treat the screen like a canvas and to fill it with rich imagery of the sort that don't get to see a lot of in day to day life. I love historical settings, when attention is paid to the costumes and the details of day to day life in strange times and places. Memoirs of a Geisha, for example, is a rich film in this regard, and it also has a good story. Ridley Scott can usually be counted on to make stunning visual films. Kingdom of Heaven is gorgeous to look at, for example. The story isn't terrible but it isn't quite up to the level of the visuals. (The stills above are from a HD Kingdom of Heaven clip on the Apple website. I used Quicktime to capture them; clicking on them should give you the full image.)

It's probably my fondness for films that look good that prevents me from having much affection for older film, despite the fact that a lot of them have stories I might like. Most films before the 1970's have cameras that are too static. The look like they are filming a theatrical production, with the odd close up of an actor's face thrown in. And while I might be willing to overlook this flaw on occasion - for Alfred Hitchcock, for example - as a general rule the oldies are a wasteland.

Today's picks (it's not like I do this often) were:

Pride and Prejudice, the recent version with Kiera Knightly. This is a great story and gorgeous cinematography make this the one I was looking for for weeks. Finally got a copy today.

Walk the Line. I really enjoyed this one. The acting is very strong and the music is wonderful. I don't have a copy of Ray, but it's also one that I would consider.

An Unfinished Life. This one stars Robert Redford, Morgan Freeman and Jenifer Lopez. Rebecca and I saw it a while back and enjoyed the rustic life it portrayed, and the enduring friendship portrayed by Redford and Freeman. Lopez was ok.

The one the got away: Memoirs of a Geisha.

Still on the lookout and losing hope: Kingdom of Heaven.

Outside chances: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (best in the series thus far); Last of the Mohicans, and Minority Report. These just happen to available to me at the moment and since I didn't get them today, odds are I won't.

DVD gripe zone: Why do film makers insist on releasing DVD's that force you to sit through previews and ads? I'm just going to turn the sound down and make popcorn anyway. Idiots. The menu system exits for these kinds of things and you go and disable it so five years from now people will still be forced to find a way around your hopelessly dated ad.

Thoughts?

Technical note

2006-05-25T19:11:00.000-07:00

As you can see, I am trying to pull this blog together after some down time. I'm trying to post more regularly and made some changes to the template, to make it more reflective of what I'm reading currently. I am still having some technical problems, however, so your patience (and advice!) is appreciated.

I'm still trying to settle on what to use for post composition. Using Pages was Ok, but somehow or other my links seemed to get lost on the way to the blogger servers. I'm now using Apple's Mail client, which is pretty good, but it seems to be struggling with formating. It seems to generate a lot of HTML code when text is posted, especially when I quote text from outside sources. To try and get around that, I've switched to forcing Mail to use "plain text" in the composer. That ought to help a lot. If you are seeing things like gigantic text or other really weird bits of formatting, do let me know. As far as I can see, republishing the post via blogger's composer window fixes most of the anomalies that I see on first posting from Mail. If it does not, I will probably revert to using G-mail and simply saving a copy of longer posts in a Pages file for safekeeping.

In addition, when I made some updates to the template on the weekend blogger managed to cut off the end of the document, leaving the right column truncated. It's not that serious as I was paring it down anyway, but it looks odd at the moment. If I get some time I will try and straighten that out.

It may not sound like it, but I am getting more proficient with the Mac everyday. Finding out where all the cool kids hang out sure does help. Here are some resources that have come in handy:

The Apple site itself is useful, of course, but it does not seem to carry links to much in the way of free-ware.

On the book side of things, I've finally started one I have long been meaning to start - Victor Reppert's C.S. Lewis' Dangerous Idea. Since Lewis has been influential on me, and since I also have a copy of Dennet's Darwin's Dangerous Idea from a few years ago, this ought to be interesting. If it is, it will find its way here.

The philosophy of Happiness

2006-05-24T21:50:00.000-07:00

Here's romp through three articles that take on the subject of human happiness - and why Liberal notions of what that is will make you miserable.

First, this WAPO review looks at a new book on Benedict Spinoza. The book claims Spinoza as an important forerunner of the kind of Liberty that would be made famous by books like JS Mills' famous tome.

Spinoza recognizes that he needs what he himself calls his "cumbersome, geometric order." People, he shows, are constantly being led astray by the randomness of their sensual experience, by their imaginations and passions. Only mathematics provides a model for conclusions that cannot be refuted, that are either right or wrong: "I will write about human beings as though I were concerned with lines and planes and solids."

Surprisingly, the Ethics opens by establishing basic truths about God and nature. Everything that exists is part of the single substance of the deity, who, in fact, is identical with Nature, or as Spinoza invariably writes "God, or Nature." Because everything is inherent in God eternally, there are no goals or ends for man or the universe. As Matthew Stewart says in The Courtier and the Heretic (Norton), a highly recommended new biographical study of Spinoza and Leibniz, "To the fundamental question -- what makes us special? -- Spinoza offers a clear and devastating answer: nothing."

Nihilism isn't a promising beginning for finding out what makes people happy. Spinoza's mistake - and it's repeated in much Liberal thought - is that he can put his heart to one side and simply muscle his way into Nirvana with his brain. Of course, relying on one's brain is an act of faith, so one hasn't really discarded faith after all. All that's really accomplished is here is closing one eye and wondering why you can't read twice as fast. I think that lopsided outlook is likely what leads Spinoza to fail to differentiate God from nature as well, and this leads to a whole mess of problems not relevant here. (And why on earth is is surprising to begin a book on ethics by sketching ontology and epistemology? Where else would you start?)

Jumping to our own period, The Toronto Star recently carried this story about a team at Harvard studying - what else? - happiness. They find that most of us do a very poor job of predicting what will make us happy or sad in the future:

The Harvard researchers have also done extensive interviews with sports fans who just know they'll never smile again if their team loses but, of course, recover speedily after a loss.

"The human brain mispredicts the sources of its own satisfaction," Gilbert says, "and the reason is that we fail to understand how quickly we will adapt to both positive and negative events. People are consistently surprised by how quickly the abnormal becomes normal, the extraordinary becomes ordinary. When people say I could never get used to that, they are almost always wrong."

Gilbert believes we have an emotional immune system that helps us regain our equilibrium after catastrophic events.

"The studies of Holocaust survivors are clear - most went on to lead happy and productive lives," he says.

These findings brought to my mind almost immediately the terrible Teri Schaivo story of last year. I talked to a lot of people on the net about that and lost track of how many of them told me they supported Terri's "right to die" because they thought that no one could ever be happy in that condition. Even if it were possible, they said, it was extraordinarily unlikely. I didn't think so then, and I certainly don't think so now. I also don't think babies can be aborted because the parents can't buy clothes from Baby Gap. A centered person knows that this has nothing to do with happiness. The Liberal, on the other hand, sees someone contemplating doom and despair and offers the equivalent of a shrug. "It's up to you," they'll say, as if they were heroic or something.

The Star article goes on:

Is there a better way to predict what will make us happy than using our imagination?

"Yes," says [Gilbert], "but no one wants to use it. It's called surrugation, and it circumvents biases and errors. If you want to know how happy you'll be if you win the lottery, ask a lottery winner — it's a mixed blessing. Will having children make you happy? Observe people who have them."

People discount this approach because of what Gilbert calls "the myth of fingerprints."

"Most of us have the illusion of uniqueness," he says. "We believe that other people's reactions won't tell us about our likes and dislikes. But we are remarkably similar. We share the same biology, and others' experiences can teach us a great deal about our own.

"As long as we maintain our illusions about our uniqueness, we will continue to ignore information that's in front of our noses."

I see in this an affirmation that it is right to take important clues about moral ups and downs from the community that we are in, provided that that community has a tradition of affirming everyone's right to a respectable place in the social fabric. The record will likely not be perfect, but then kids don't sing opera on day one either. Our everyday "sensual experiences" are not random, as Spinoza contended, they are rooted in social traditions and norms that survive only because they are well adapted. Thus they do not deserve the scorn Liberals direct at them. They keep us connected and keep us from drifting into into billions of isolated islands when we are a human pangea of past, present and future.

Roger Scruton puts it like this in the WSJ:

Taking On Liberty and Principles together we find, in fact, a premonition of much that conservatives object to in the modern liberal worldview. The "harm" doctrine of On Liberty has been used again and again to subvert those aspects of law which are founded not in policy but in our inherited sense of the sacred and the prohibited. Hence this doctrine has made it impossible for the law to protect the core institutions of society, namely marriage and the family, from the sexual predators. Meanwhile, the statist morality of "Principles" has flowed into the moral vacuum, so that the very same law that refuses to intervene to protect children from pornography will insist that every aspect of our lives be governed by regulations that put the state in charge.

Mill famously referred to the Conservative Party as "the stupider party," he being, from 1865, a member of Parliament in the Liberal interest. And no doubt the average Tory MP was no match for the brain that had conceived the "System of Logic"--an enduring classic and Mill's greatest achievement. Yet Mill suffered from the same defect as his father. He never understood that wisdom is deeper and rarer than rational thought. He never understood that the intellect, which flies so easily to its conclusions, relies on something else for its premises. Those conservatives who upheld what Mill called "the despotism of custom" against the "experiments in living" advocated in "On Liberty" were not stupid simply because they recognized the limits of the human intellect. They were, on the contrary, aware that freedom and custom are mutually dependent, and that to free oneself from moral norms is to surrender to the state. For only the state can manage the ensuing disaster.

The German Child and other jokes

2006-05-24T18:31:00.000-07:00

This Guardian article, by an English stand up comic on his work experiences in Germany, was unusual in that it managed to be funny and fascinating at the same time.

Here is a snippet that begins with a joke:

An English couple have a child. After the birth, medical tests reveal that the child is normal, apart from the fact that it is German. This, however, should not be a problem. There is nothing to worry about. As the child grows older, it dresses in lederhosen and has a pudding bowl haircut, but all its basic functions develop normally. It can walk, eat, sleep, read and so on, but for some reason the German child never speaks. The concerned parents take it to the doctor, who reassures them that as the German child is perfectly developed in all other areas, there is nothing to worry about and that he is sure the speech faculty will eventually blossom. Years pass. The German child enters its teens, and still it is not speaking, though in all other respects it is fully functional. The German child's mother is especially distressed by this, but attempts to conceal her sadness. One day she makes the German child, who is now 17 years old and still silent, a bowl of tomato soup, and takes it through to him in the parlour where he is listening to a wind-up gramophone record player. Soon, the German child appears in the kitchen and suddenly declares, "Mother. This soup is a little tepid." The German child's mother is astonished. "All these years," she exclaims, "we assumed you could not speak. And yet all along it appears you could. Why? Why did you never say anything before?" "Because, mother," answers the German child, "up until now, everything has been satisfactory."

The implication of this fabulous joke is that the Germans are ruthlessly rational, and this assumption leaves us little room to imagine them finding time to be playful. But be assured, the German sense of humour not only exists, it actually flourishes, albeit in a form we are ill-equipped to recognise.

It seems to me that all of his observations are true. I'm from a German family but was born and raised in an English country - Canada. English is not only my first language, it is what I studied in University. Germans do indeed have a very hard time with irony and double entendre and that probably goes a long way towards the English description of them as humourless. It must also play a role in the peculiar nature of German jokes. If you've listened to them in translation, or even if you read the ones at the end of the article, you'll know what I mean.

Our linguistic and cultural blinders are usually opaque to us; the blessing of the stranger is that he or she reveals them to us.

Beware the inquisition

2006-05-22T10:41:00.000-07:00

The always erudite Wretchard quotes Andrew Sullivan and then goes on to note something interesting. First, Sullivan:

a follower of Opus Dei, Ruth Kelly, is now the Equality Minister in the Blair cabinet, bringing calls for removal from some gay groups. I think those groups are mistaken. Kelly has every right to her religious faith; and she has also publicly insisted that as a public servant, her first loyalty is to uphold the laws as they stand. That's exactly the right position; and exactly the right distinction between faith and politics.

Writes Wretchard:

One indicator of how much the early 21st century has come to resemble the era of religious wars is the revival in various guises of the concept of cuius regio, eius religio "a phrase in Latin that means 'whose rule, his religion'." The Free Dictionary notes that cuius regio eius religio forms the basis for state sponsored religions, and once granted that Political Correctness constitutes a religion in all but name it becomes apparent that all candidates for high or official positions will become subject to a doctrinal test. The Inquisition returns in its modern form, asking after Blasphemy and Witchcraft - put differently of course.

It is perfectly understandable that a democratic populace would want to be sure that members of its government will uphold the laws as they stand. That is what the Rule of Law is all about, after all. Yet surely this cannot be legitimately extended to mean that government members cannot argue for appealing or even repealing current laws. Nether can it be argued that some "sensitive issues" are simply beyond the reach of public debate. To do so would impoverish our democratic institutions and our understanding of the issue at hand. Such Democratic ghettos can't be the solution; this is the step to the unnamed state religion Wretchard notes above.

The only thing beyond debate is the Rule of Law itself - and, I argue, the inherent dignity of every human being. Bringing either of those into question is a recipe for disaster. Thankfully in Canada, no one is seriously questioning the rule of law. The Conservatives fiscal starving of the gun registry might be creative use of federal power, but the budget is fully within the legitimate powers of the government. The opposition could have failed to pass the budget but were unwilling to pay that price. That is their choice. As far as electoral abuses go, this is probably on shakier moral ground. Unless those involved stop hiding who they are by claiming to be "everyman".

If you're "everyman", who is your opposition? Power. This is delegitimization, pure and simple. Opposition to MP Emerson's crossing the floor will have to use legal means to bring about the changes it seeks, and that means any amendments will be too late to affect Emerson himself.

Of course, we still have a long way to go as regards the dignity of every human being.

Doctor, heal thyself

2006-05-21T18:01:00.000-07:00

Spengler comes through with a colunmn on the anniversary of Freud's birthday that's definitely worth mulling over:

Having cured society of repression by making sexual pleasure a commodity, enlightened opinion is shocked, shocked to discover an epidemic of depression. In consequence some 70 million Americans have taken anti-depressants. Psychotropic drugs, I hasten to add, work miracles for many who suffer from imbalances of brain chemistry, and I mean no criticism of psychopharmacology in general. But the vast numbers involved suggest that a spiritual ailment is epidemic for which anti-depressants cannot be the solution. ...

Human beings are not beasts content with daily fodder and rutting in season. To be sentient is to be sentient of one's mortality. The status of wife and mother in a family within a community offers women an honored position and a link to the eternal. Sexual objectification leaves women with a foretaste of death, and it should be no surprise that Freud's program drives women into deadly behavior. It will take long and painful efforts to repair the damage, but putting a stake through the old reprobate's heart is not a bad way to begin.

I don't like the old coot either - meaning Freud, of course. Spengler I like just fine. The Left will say that I'm trying to force everyone into the same box, but that's not the case at all. It makes their job easier to paint me into that box, but that's about all it does. Of course not everyone wants to have a family. Some occupations and vocations are ill suited to it and make no mistake we need people to fill those roles. What I am saying is that more people want a happy home than can admit it publicly, and that's a situation that might be connected to depression, as Spengler contends. For most of us, a job will only be a job. Fulfillment - that comes from a safe place in a social web with ties to a future and a past. When you live in the moment, nothing ever blooms, because nothing is planted and tended.

Da Vinci: It bleats, it leads

2006-05-20T20:33:00.000-07:00

The trouble with The DaVinci code is certainly this:

the fundamentals of the Christian creed can be summarized in a few sentences easily learned by schoolchildren and recited aloud from memory by the whole congregation on Sunday. They are great mysteries to be sure - Trinity, incarnation, redemption, salvation, crucifixion, resurrection - but they are simple enough to explain. Contrast that with the account Mr. Brown offers of a centuries-long fraud, sustained by shadowy groups, imperial politics, ruthless brutality and latterly revealed by a secret code "hidden" in one of the world's most famous paintings.
The Christian Gospel offers a coherent, comprehensible account of reality that invites the assent of faith. It requires a choice with consequences. Mr. Brown's dissent from Christianity offers a bewildering and incredible amalgam of falsehoods and implausibilities, painting a picture of a world in which the unenlightened are subject to the manipulations of the few. Call it paganism, Gnosticism, or simply hucksterism, but Mr. Brown is in a long, and occasionally lucrative, tradition.
My suspicion is that the popularity of The Da Vinci Code lies precisely in that it avoids putting the simple choice of faith before us - a choice that has consequences. It provides instead the comfortable paralysis of not being responsible; after all, if the whole religious architecture of the West is the mother of all frauds, what is left to do but simply go to the movies?

This is why I have no interest whatsoever in Dan Brown's book, or the movie. I've resolved this question am not interested in revisiting it. It's been done - and by better thinkers and writers than Brown and his Sony cohorts.

The trouble, however, is not limited to Father DeSouza's points. Catholic responses to the movie have been mixed, with too many simply condemning the film. It's possible that they are the only ones we see in the media coverage: ie. "it bleats, it leads". That is not the sort of coverage anyone needs. Even when you're right, you have a delimma: what are you going to do about it? The smarter response in any case is to invite discussion with people who are willing to at least hear. It has to be a given that people have questions. They don't have a firm grasp of theology (most of the time). They fear power and the claims of the Church really are breathtaking. So, invite them in and answer their questions as best you can. It is a pilgrim church, but it is also a teaching church. Burning the book - as I saw happened in at least one Italian town today - might be an emotional release for people who feel put upon, but the very last thing we want is for people on the fence on these issues to draw a parallel between our reaction to this controversy and, say, the Islamic reaction to the Danish cartoons. Present a coherent case and trust that most people will, in due time, come to see it. It's better to be talked about than ignored.

A bit more on the Mac

2006-05-15T14:43:00.000-07:00

And Survivor stuff too!

I'm sorry that posting to this site has become such a rare event. As I've written here before, the time available for blogging is not what it was. The primary culprit remains that I'm missing about two hours plus out of my day, every workday. What free time I've had has gone into playing with the Mac. David Pogue's Missing Manual is my primary reading material again. It makes more sense now that I'm more familiar with the Mac interface, and it contains a lot more information that Leo LaPorte's book. LaPorte was great for an introduction but left too many side-roads unexplored. I wanna see everything! I'm that kind of guy.

I don't want to bore you with it, but...

Today I realized that OS X's "services" include the ability to send e-mails composed in programs other than Mail. Programs like Pages, for example. Pages is Apple's word processor and it's very pleasant to use. It's better than Blogger's compose window (anything is better than that), and better than G-mail's because it's less cluttered. Unlike Apple's Mail program, Pages will easily allow me to keep a copy of my postings on this computer. I can compose and format here, and call up services --> mail when I'm done. Presto, my post appears in Mail, needing only to be addressed to NWW.

I like it. I'm also (slowly) finding a few very handy keyboard shortcuts. Cut and paste were easy, and I finally figured out how to send my cursor to the beginning or end of a line (command arrow left or command arrow right) while editing. Add little command tab action for fast switching between apps and slowly getting a grip dealing on screen clutter and things are starting to come together. Hiding programs (command H) is brilliant, as is Expose.

Rebecca and I are also messing about with some of the iLife apps. Rebecca used iMovie, for example (or was it iDVD?), to create a slideshow for a church event. It was played on the DVD player there as a background for a social event. I upgraded to the full version of Quicktime, primarily so that I could copy HD video clips to this computer for future playback. They look terrific! I do wonder, though, if I am in fact seeing them in the full HD. Does anyone know if the iMac screen is capable of HD playback? To my eyes, the HD clips I downloaded from Apple look better than the DVDs I've viewed here.

And the Survivor stuff? Well, I won a pool at the office when Aras took the prize last night. I can't say that I particularly liked him. It's not that he is totally unlike-able, but he a couple of character flaws that did grate on me. Some of that is simply his youth, like when he berated Terry over the older man's take on the whole mother - wife issue. Frankly, Aras' looked and sounded every bit like a child during that exchange. Yer mum, kid, is a warm cocoon that you'll be very close to all your life, even after you've molted out of dependency on her. Yer wife is more like your left arm. You don't outgrow her. You might make headway on this issue if you get out of the basement and find yourself in a relationship that isn't based on depenency. I'm rather skeptical that an unearned million bucks to help you "find yourself" will help much. If he is not careful, Aras may in fact wind up with someone dependent on him. The taunts about Terry and women were a pathetic smear and only made Aras look like five year old who'd just learned a new taunt on the playground. Kinda like holding a hammer makes everything look like a nail.

Still, I have hope for Aras. I think he has potential.

The other choice in the final was much worse. Fake boobed, fork tongued Danielle was impossible to warm up to in any way. How can she ever have expected anyone to take her offers of alliance and reciprocity seriously when she never followed through? Every time it was her turn to return a favour, her response was "I have to see how this will play out for me. You understand, right? You'd do the same. It's only rational." Frankly my dear, this attitude is completely irrational. I know the game prompts you to break promises but the point here is to balance that off against the very human need to form and maintain reciprocal relationships. I'm not talking about contract law here, I'm talking about everyday life. Danielle was repulsive through most of the show and the fact that she only got two votes last night ought to hammer that home.

Both candidates displayed the unthinking narcissism that is the calling card of too many young adults. Displaying it is not the most horrible thing - after all, we have to grow out of it by seeking transformative experiences. Aras, bless him, did display some of that seeking, as did the tiresome Courtney. They tended to express it as seeking self fulfillment and perhaps that is understandable in our culture, a give me, I want, I need kind of culture. If you think I'm being too hard on them you have to understand that I'm not saying anything of them that I would not say of myself at that point in my life. I think that attending Mass every week has sharpened my thinking about my relationship to the community considerably. You have to give, sometimes without any realistic hope of getting anything back. You simply do it because it is right.

Courtney talked last night about how difficult situations can be gifts and in that she really was onto something. Giving without counting the cost is hard, as is learning to see all of the needs that cry out for us to respond to. Doing so leads to real personal growth, however. Unless Danielle realizes this, she will be a terrible candidate for someone’s wife. "Yes, know that I said for better or worse, in sickness and in health, but I'm really bored with you and I want a divorce. You understand, don’t you? Besides, I have better offers and I need to do what's best for me. And that cancerous lump of yours is so, like, gross. Ta!"

***

Hmm, it seems links created in Pages don't make the jump to Mail. Or something. I've no time to add them, sorry, but you can tell where the intended links are by the colour. At least the one added from within Mail still works. I'll work around that in the future.

"I'm a PC" "And I'm a Mac"

2006-05-02T17:52:00.000-07:00

These new ads are great. I especially like the one about iLife, since iTunes was what lead me to take a long, hard look at what the Mac has to offer these days. For the record, while I have had apps crash on me in the week plus that I've been working on this thing, OS X hasn't gone down once. It hasn't even slowed down, indicating that it's time for a re-boot.

Working it out

2006-04-30T18:42:00.000-07:00

It's been a busy week for me! Between longer work days and toying with the new Mac, the blog seems to have fallen out a bit. As mentioned, another problem has been losing the composition tool that I used to use (w.bloggar) on the PC. I realized some time in the middle of the week that I could use blogger's "publish by e-mail" feature, and, what's more, that I could send post in via G-mail. That means all my work could be done in one application. It also offers spell check and online backup of my posts. Very nice. Also, it was probably an obvious solution to many people long before I figured it out. Because I've been so busy, I've just now gotten around to trying it out. And since my wife is making diner and not DVDs at the moment, it's carpe diem time. But what to write? I spent yesterday afternoon going over the documentation related to my new work chores with the goal of finding variances between what I really do, and what I'm scheduled to do. I found anomalies, both big and small, and will be submitting my findings tomorrow. After that it'll be out of my hands for a while. Wish me luck on this. I need at least some of these things to be approved and I'd really rather the process not be dragged out. On the Mac score, I'm getting around alright but still a newbie. I checked out David Pogue's Missing Mannual for OS X but found that to be slow going. Not because it was hard, but because it was a bit boring. My wife kindly got me Leo LaPorte's Guide to OS X and that it much better. You might know Leo if you have Tech TV. He does Call for Help, a TV show about computers that seems to be always on, and always interesting. Pogue might have fared better if I had his "Switch to OS X" instead. I'm still getting acquainted with the Finder for the most part. I really want to know about cool stuff like Spotlight, iPhoto, Airport, and so on, but I'll walk before I run. I am enjoying the machine a lot. The monitor and the "quartz" technology makes reading off this thing considerably more pleasant. Really, I had no idea what I was missing. I think a machine like this would be great for my Dad, who I have been tutoring on computer use for the past year. A one button mouse and files that are easy to find would make his life a lot easier, and .Mac has potential for sharing. I just wish it wasn't so pricey. So, that's me. If this post is successful, there will likely be more to come.

A Mac, Mac world

2006-04-23T17:55:00.000-07:00

Making the move I've been going through some issues at work that I won't go into here - what's relevant is that my time is less than it was. I'm happy to be back blogging again, but it's a fact posting is going to be spotty going forward. That is, unless my muse doinks me about the head and sets my pants on fire. That's the less happy part of this post. The happy part is the buried lede that starts here. Rebecca and I caved into iCulture in a big way this weekend and bought an iMac. I'll confess to wanting one in the worst way since before Christmas. Heck, my curiosity goes back to the OS X rollout. Anyway, it's here, I'm sharing it with Rebecca, and it's beautiful as all get out. The screen is fabulous and the built in speakers are surprisingly good. It's amazingly less cluttered than a PC, and that's with a wired keyboard and mouse. We are only just beginning to understand what Bluetooth and Airport could do. I'm more than a little at sea with it. It's the first Mac I've ever owned, and I haven't used one since I used once since a workplace 10 + years ago that had a couple of decrepit Mac IIs. We got it set up on our network and on the Internet without any trouble. I managed to install Firefox without breaking anything. I did gave Safari a look but it does not impress. I also managed to import all my files - including a fair sized iTunes collection - from a DVD I burned on the not-so-old HP PC that Rebecca is now using. I did loose all the ratings associated with my music, but hey... Oh, and my HP printer does not have Mac drivers available. We were lucky enought to get a deal at London Drugs where they threw in a free Canon multifunction and that works fine. It is taking me longer to do things I could do with my eyes closed in XP, but that's not the Mac's fault. I'm learning to walk here. Firefox is working dandy and between that and iTunes I'll get a lot done. I do need to replace some of the more handy tools that have no Mac counterpart and I'm hoping somebody here can help me out. High on my list is a composition tool for blogger, to replace w.bloggar. Any suggestions? We have Pages 2 but I'm not aware of any hook in to blogger like there is for MS Word. I'm also undecided about .Mac and am not sure what that offers me as a a blogger, if anything. Speaking of Office applications, I was using happily Open Office on the XP machine but see to my dismay that Open Office does not yett support Intel based Macs. I'm not a big spreadsheet user, but is there anything? I mean, besides Appleworks? That looks like it's about to be discontintued. MS Office for Mac is a no go. It's way over the top for my needs and budget. I'm also puzzed by the behavior of the "home" and "end" keys as I'm typing this. They take me to the top and bottom of the document instead of to the beginning and end of a line. Can I change that? That's annoying and I can't see any way to do it in preferences (unless I'm blind; it's happened). The built in camera sure is cool, though. Here are some sites I've been visiting to psyche myself up for this.

Want to add to this list?

An unrelated matter

2006-04-19T17:10:00.000-07:00

In an unrelated matter, this is to point out that Lileks is a funny guy:

... then I remembered he's more of a control freak (and there's another term I can't stand, mostly because of the "freak" part. I'd prefer situation administrator or perhaps orderliness enthusiast. "Freak" has sixties / seventies vibe. [As does "vibe," for that matter. Half the slang used by aging boomers was tired when it was used by some guy in a white jump suit and aviator-framed sunglasses, nodding his head to the Love Unlimited Orchestra as he made his way across the fern bar with a White Russian in one hand, fingering the coke spoon around his next with the other. I do not belong to that era. I do not belong to any era, except perhaps the era when all your friends' dads looked like Bill Cullen.] It was a term of approval: let your freak flag fly! Shock the man! Make Anita Bryant wet herself in fear and disgust! Why don't we do it in the road? Oh, I don't know - maybe because it's a truck route, and the idea of making some working guy jack-knife his rig because he spots some Abbie-Hoffman type in a "Makin' Bacon" T-shirt bent over his old lady, looking up at the last minute to flip the driver the bird? Is that a good enough reason? No? Fine.) than I am.

That's my kind of run-on sentence.

Warren on Easter

2006-04-17T11:19:00.000-07:00

David Warren adds his two fine bits to the topic of tradition and apocrypha here.

Easter reflection, two

2006-04-17T10:35:00.000-07:00

I'm continuing where I left off Saturday by placing questions and "new angles" about the Christian story along side Orthodoxy as I know it. These Davinci Code sort of questions are all the rage at the moment, and the fire is helped along by scholars like Bart Ehrman feeding the flames by pointing to supposed problems in the Bible itself. My favourite Gnostic is on it, and so is Scott Adams over at The Dilbert Blog:

Just to give you a flavor of the magnitude of the problems, according to Ehrman, there are more changes (both intentional and unintentional) in the Bible than there are words in the New Testament. The estimates range from 200,000 to 400,000. Yesterday I read that half of the people who voted for President Bush believe that the popular King James version of the Bible is the literal word of God. How does one reconcile that belief with the fact that experts know the Bible is riddled with human additions and errors? Here are the only arguments I can think of:
1. You infidel! 200,000 changes isn't that many. 2. Those document experts are Satan's helpers. There are no changes. 3. I never knew about those 200,000 changes. I renounce my faith! 4. God works in mysterious ways. In this case he used thousands of semi-literate, opinionated morons to edit the Bible until now it's perfect. 5. Let me freshen your drink.

The answer to Adams' question is #4 and it isn't as silly as Adams makes it out to be. #1 and #2 are eyes closed fundamentalism and #3 and #5 are what happens to fundamentalists when they can't force their eyes shut any longer. If the bulk of your information on the subject is coming to you from mass media you will hear very little about #4, which, by the way, Scott has garbled. He's still hung up on the idea that the Bible simply must be a fixed text to be of any value. But there is no such thing as a "fixed" text and there never has been. There is much to be said on this point, which we'll get to. Quick question first though: Why is Adams, as are so many, quick to place his trust in something he read, namely, "half of the people who voted for President Bush believe that the popular King James version of the Bible is the literal word of God." Where is that from? What was the methodology? Heck, Adams does not name his source, so why should I believe it unless I simply place my trust in his honesty and skill in separating real facts from bogus factoids? Let's move along and work our way through Chapter Three of the First Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation. From Chapter Three:

SACRED SCRIPTURE, ITS INSPIRATION AND DIVINE INTERPRETATION 11. Those divinely revealed realities which are contained and presented in Sacred Scripture have been committed to writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. For holy mother Church, relying on the belief of the Apostles (see John 20:31; 2 Tim. 3:16; 2 Peter 1:19-20, 3:15-16), holds that the books of both the Old and New Testaments in their entirety, with all their parts, are sacred and canonical because written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God as their author and have been handed on as such to the Church herself. (1) In composing the sacred books, God chose men and while employed by Him (2) they made use of their powers and abilities, so that with Him acting in them and through them, (3) they, as true authors, consigned to writing everything and only those things which He wanted. (4) Therefore, since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings (5) for the sake of salvation.

Yadda, yadda, yadda. This is not far off from the standard the Bible is a "book written by the flaming hand of God stuff." If the Vatican document stopped here, scholarship like Ehrman's would be much more of a threat than it in fact is. Providentially, perhaps, the document is considerably more sophisticated than that.

12. However, since God speaks in Sacred Scripture through men in human fashion, (6) the interpreter of Sacred Scripture, in order to see clearly what God wanted to communicate to us, should carefully investigate what meaning the sacred writers really intended, and what God wanted to manifest by means of their words. To search out the intention of the sacred writers, attention should be given, among other things, to "literary forms." For truth is set forth and expressed differently in texts which are variously historical, prophetic, poetic, or of other forms of discourse. The interpreter must investigate what meaning the sacred writer * intended to express and actually expressed ** in particular circumstances *** by using contemporary literary forms **** in accordance with the situation of his own time and culture. [edited for emphasis - ed.] (7) For the correct understanding of what the sacred author wanted to assert, due attention must be paid to the customary and characteristic styles of feeling, speaking and narrating which prevailed at the time of the sacred writer, and to the patterns men normally employed at that period in their everyday dealings with one another. (8)

What this second passage does is remind us that a text is a dead letter until we enter into it, and/or or it enters into us. This does not mean, as some of the post modernists tell us, that in a text we see only our own reflection and never enter into a dialogue with the author. It does mean, as the postmoderns tell us, that no book is ever closed. Every time we learn something new, our interaction with the text has the potential to alter, to deepen. The presumption of the fixed text school of thought - sadly, held by most people it seems, including Ehrman and Adams - is that when we learn something new about a text, there is a high probability that the text will be broken. Adams can perhaps be forgiven more easily than Ehrman. Coming from the world of engineering and computing, where texts are very "brittle" in the sense that they are very precise and will truly need to be rethought if a contradiction is found, Adams might be tempted to carry such a method over to the poetic and prophetic world of scripture. The temptation is understandable but unwise. Ehrman, however, because he is working with the scriptures, should be more adaptable than that. It seems instead that he wants and expects scripture to provide him with clear and positive evidence with which to prop up his faith. This is backwards. One does not read in order to believe, but one believes in order to read. And in reading, one finds food in which to nourish belief. That's a logical circle and unacceptable to many; I'm well aware of it. It also happens to be true, and not just of religious texts. Any syllogism you construct will present you with a number of premises which you have to accept or reject in your evaluation of it. Determining the truth or falsity of any one of them could draw you to another syllogism, ad finititum, until you bump up against the sorts of metaphysical constructs that can't be falsified or verified. Like what? Like "time exists", "some things are alive and some are not", "I have an idependent existence from other people", "other people do exist and are like me", "events are caused by other events", "the world behaves in largely predictable ways", and "I have the mental skills to work out a reliable way of thinking". Any school of thought one can name stands on any number of foundation stones like these. There is nothing dirty or dishonest about recognizing that we have mental lenses through which we look at the world, and we cannot pick our lenses objectively because until we try one on we are completely blind. This is not to say that all such mental lenses are equal. People really do have heartbreaking moments when they can no longer accomodate incoming data with their lenses. At these moments, which we can call "conversion", the lens must be changed or altered in ways that can be extremely disorienting. Ehrman gives every appearance of having passed through such a moment. From where I sit, he's reshaped his lense in the wrong spot, keeping his positivism and ditching his Christian faith; he could have ditched the positivism and learned to be more nuanced in his faith. Returning to the Vatican I document we get to the meat of the matter, a rebuttal of Erhman and a mature response for Adams:

since Holy Scripture must be read and interpreted in the sacred spirit in which it was written, (9) no less serious attention must be given to the content and unity of the whole of Scripture if the meaning of the sacred texts is to be correctly worked out. The living tradition of the whole Church must be taken into account along with the harmony which exists between elements of the faith. It is the task of exegetes to work according to these rules toward a better understanding and explanation of the meaning of Sacred Scripture, so that through preparatory study the judgment of the Church may mature. For all of what has been said about the way of interpreting Scripture is subject finally to the judgment of the Church, which carries out the divine commission and ministry of guarding and interpreting the word of God. (10) 13. In Sacred Scripture, therefore, while the truth and holiness of God always remains intact, the marvelous "condescension" of eternal wisdom is clearly shown, "that we may learn the gentle kindness of God, which words cannot express, and how far He has gone in adapting His language with thoughtful concern for our weak human nature." (11) For the words of God, expressed in human language, have been made like human discourse, just as the word of the eternal Father, when He took to Himself the flesh of human weakness, was in every way made like men.

The seeming openess of texts is a result of our inability to grasp the world - including texts, sacred and otherwise - as they truly are. The Word is fixed and eternal but we never enter it fully in this life. An example might help to clarify. One of the ceremonial elements in Catholic worship that I really like is incensing the Bible just before the gospel is read. Often this creates a stunning image of just what I am talking about. One sees smoke appearing to rise from the book towards the priest doing the reading. It is an image of the text leaving the confines of the page and entering us in the hope that we might enter into it. This smoke wafts its way to the pews, continuing the image, and one does not just see it, but also smells it. The smell is warm, attractive, and above all brief in duration. It comes and it goes and usually by the time the reading is done there are only traces left. Underscoring the above, before the text is read, the priest says "May the Spirit be with you", and the congregation responds, "and also with you." In other words our helplessness in fully grasping the Word is made plain, and the aid of the Spirit is invoked to help overcome that gap (for lay and religious alike). This approach is not unique to Catholics. There are Protestant groups who invoke the Spirit to guide them as well. The difference and the scandal is that for Catholics the Spirit takes form in the Church's Magesterium, narrowing the bounds of interpretation and roping off false trails. For both groups, however, invoking the Spirit underscores that being a Christian is not merely a matter book learning, a matter of getting the facts and the ceremonies right. It is a about a relationship with the Divine person, and the Divine book is a tool to that end. All of the poetry, history and imagery it uses has to be understood in that light. I include in this not only the intellectual challenge posed by a story like Lazarus' rising from the dead, but also challenges like those Erhman raises. His issues do not bother me inordinately because the Bible is not a dead canonical letter but a ring with a fuzzy boundary in which the Spirit may be tussled with. One should not expect the matter of interpretation to go away. One should embrace it like an athlete going to the gym.

Screwtape on DaVinci

2006-04-15T15:03:00.000-07:00

Wondering what Screwtape makes of The DaVinci Code? Wonder no more!

My dear Wormwood, ... another extremely admirable facet of this book is the author's intimate knowledge of his audience's skyscraping ignorance, which he exploits to devastating effect. One must ever endeavor to capitalize upon ignorance, Wormwood. This is one of the chiefest weapons in our arsenal, and let me observe—and not without some glee—that the ignorance of contemporary Western Society in matters of history and theology both, is of an absolutely unprecedented greatness. Never before have so many known so little about so much of great importance. Ask your average fellow in the street the slightest detail of a daft sitcom of forty years ago and he will move heaven and earth to supply you with the answer, and then will likely prate on with other similarly inane details—as if knowing who lived at 1313 Mockingbird Lane was his very passport to the Elysian Fields. Ha! But ask him to tell you about the Nicean Council, or ask him what are the Synoptic Gospels and you will suddenly find yourself in the presence of a weatherbeaten cigar store Injun! But then go ahead and ask him who played drums for The Monkees, or the name of that blasted itinerant peddlar on Green Acres and you will think yourself in the presence of a very Voltaire! Our television executives Down Under have been awfully successful! As I say, this book exploits the ignorance of its readership with an exemplary elan. One particularly daring example claims that the Crusades were principally concerned with gathering and destroying information! This is bold and laughable twaddle, but it fits so nicely into ye olde conspiracy theory—that the powerful religious hypocrites want to keep the "truth" out of the hands of their powerless subjects. And what do readers of this book know of the Crusades? Then there's that double whopper with cheese, about how the Emperor Constantine "invented" Christianity in the fourth century! Never mind that people had been believing it for all those years before it was "invented". And in the same masterstroke the author undermines the authority of the Bible by declaring that what it contains arrived on a strictly "political" vote. All of those wonderful "Gospels" that didn't fit with the "patriarchal" version of things were cruelly—always "cruelly"—suppressed and rejected; the oppressive messages it now contains were slipped in to fit Constantine's political agenda! Who among this book's readers will know that for three centuries most of those same Gospels were already considered a part of the scriptural canon? Who among his doughheaded readers even knows the meaning of the word "canonical"! My nostrils flare in admiration.

Easter reflection, one

2006-04-15T09:24:00.000-07:00

An Easter reflection for you:

The Person which assumed human nature was not created, as is the case of all other persons. His Person was the pre-existent Word or Logos. His human nature on the other hand, was derived from the miraculous conception by Mary, in which the Divine forshadowing of the human spirit and the human Fiat or the consent of a woman, were most beautifully blended. This is the beginning of a new humanity out of the material of the fallen race. When the Word became flesh, it did not mean that any change took place in the Divine Word. The Word of God proceeding forth did not leave the Father's side. What happened was not so much the conversion of the Godhead into flesh, as the taking of manhood into God. There was continuity with the fallen race of man through the manhood taken from Mary; there is discontinuity through the fact that the Person of Christ is the pre-existent Logos. Christ thus literally becomes the second Adam, the man through whom the human race starts over. His teaching centered on the incorporation of human natures into Him, after the manner in which the human nature that He took from Mary was united to the Eternal Word. It is hard for a human being to understand the humility that was involved in the Word becoming flesh. Imagine, if it were possible, a human person divesting himself of his body, and then sending his soul into the body of a serpent. A double humiliation would follow: first, accepting the limitations of a serpentine organism, knowing all the while that his mind was superior, and that fangs could not adequately articulate thoughts no serpent ever possessed. The second humiliation would be to be forced as a result of this "emptying of self" to live in the companionship of serpents. But all this is nothing compared to the emptying of God, by which he took on the form of man and accepted the limitations of humanity, such as hunger and persecution; not trivial either was it for the Wisdom of God to condemn himself to association with poor fishermen who knew so little. But this humiliation which began in Nazareth when he was conceived in the virgin Mary was only the first of many to counteract the pride of man, until the final humiliation of of death on the Cross. If there were no Cross, there would have been no crib; if there had been no nails, there would have been no straw. But he could not teach the lesson of the Cross as payment for sin; He had to take it. Fulton J. Sheen, Life of Christ

I picked up this book from the parish library this week on a bit of a lark. I read a collection of Sheen's writings before and found them to be simplistic and, worse, sorely dated in places. This book is much better. It attempts to tell the story of Christ's life as we have it, and to weave the theology of the Church into the telling, so that we can see how the two are intertwined. It's my experience that knowing this story reasonably well, especially the philosophical underpinnings, puts a considerable amount of cold water on the silly thought experiments of Dan Brown and his pack of wannabes. The problem with all of these speculations is that they don't ever seem to address the existential question of Being. The Gospel of John simply puts them to shame. In other words, the alternatives appeal to cloudy headed people of faith and materialists of all stripes. The materialists think the universe has always been and will always be. I respectfully disagree with them and the Big Bang theory just might be on my side. More puzzlingly, however, do the fuzzy headed "faithful" realize that doing away with the Incarnation rips Authority away from Jesus' teachings? All of them including the ones about mercy and forgiveness? Don't they see it leaves us with an unsympathetic Deity along the lines of what we see in Islam? Here is Hillaire Belloc on Islam. Spot the similarities...

... the central point where this new heresy struck home with a mortal blow against Catholic tradition was a full denial of the Incarnation. Mohammed did not merely take the first steps toward that denial, as the Arians had done; he advanced a clear affirmation full and complete, against the whole doctrine of an incarnate God. He taught that Our Lord was the greatest of all the prophets, but still only a prophet: a man like other men. He eliminated the Trinity altogether. With that denial of the Incarnation went the whole sacramental structure. He refused to know anything of the Eucharist, with it's Real Presence; he stopped the sacrifice of the Mass, and therefore the institution of a special priesthood. In other words, he, like so many other lesser heresiarchs, founded his heresy on simplification. Catholic doctrine was true (he seemed to say), but it had become encumbered with false accretions; it had become complicated by needless man-made additions, including the idea that the founder was Divine, and the growth of a parasitical caste of priests who battened on a late, imagined, system of sacraments which they alone could administer. All those corrupt accretions must be swept away. Hillaire Belloc, The Great Heresies

There is very likely to be another post to be had on this subject. Perhaps tomorrow.

Loud and Proud

2006-04-11T17:39:00.000-07:00

Regular readers know (and irregular readers have probably guessed) that I am of central european extraction. I can claim physical ancestors from Austria and Germany, and spiritual ancestors from Italy and probably Hungary as well. The culture in this house is undeniably Germanic once you scratch the maple syrup. Deutsche Welle is carrying a nifty photo essay on Germany that I enjoyed a lot. Here's to us!

Who let YOU out?

2006-04-08T11:57:00.000-07:00

During this quiet time there has been no blog that I have enjoyed more than Gagdad Bob's One Cosmos. He has simply been on fire for the past month. Here is my collection of hits from his post today (with the addition of a cartoon link from the comments thread):

Science, of course, proceeds on the basis that the cosmos is ultimately a closed system. While there may be local entities that temporarily escape that fact and become open systems--such as biological organisms--in the end, it is all nothing more than a brief and futile reprieve from the iron hand of entropy. From death you arose and to death you shall return. It's funny how science starts out with such admirably modest aims and methods, but soon makes such grandiose pronouncements. I yield to no one in my respect for science as science, but at the same time, when philosophically unschooled scientists start leaping to unwarranted metaphysical pronouncements, we should all be concerned. Through a sleight of language, science doesn't just replace religion, but becomes a religion. And a bad one at that. ... Likewise, from the standpoint of science, Life Itself--the vertical doorway out of the material cosmos--can really be nothing more than a very rare pattern of matter. Similarly, consciousness--the vertical pathway out the lifedoor--can only be an ephemeral and meaningless side effect of cellular activity. If this is true, then scientists--not to mention scientific "truth"--is a merely a meaningless side effect of matter. The scientist wants to give you the truth, as if he is speaking from a privileged vantage point of verticality, above the material fray. But how can he be? If he wishes to be consistent, he must concede in all modesty that matter can't really know anything, much less the truth about itself. Let's not kid our nonselves: this is your brain on science. Among other things, religions are vertical escape hatches from the grinding ineluctability of mere animal existence. For example, Moses' horizontal dash out of Egypt was in fact a vertical one, leading the Israelites from servitude in the horizontal wasteland of Egypt into the possibility of a higher life in the unknown vertical desert. ... Science deals only with repetition. Without the vertical element, time, no matter how long, can produce nothing truly novel. It can just combine and recombine in a linear or cyclical way. But it certainly cannot account for the startling ontological discontinuities represented by the leap from matter to life or from life to mind. It can rearrange the furniture, but cannot explain how we go from one ontological floor to the next. The only way you can really believe this horizontal nonsense is if your own life has become utterly linear, circular, and closed off to the vertical. Then it is a philosophy that makes a great deal of sense. Plus it is an excellent metaphysical defense mechanism, because you have an airtight explanation for your own vertical Failure to Launch. If it's impossible, why bother? Indeed Horizontal Man is superior to Vertical Man, because at least he does not live in the comfort of fanciful delusions about nonexistent vertical realms!

Crunchy Manifesto

2006-04-04T16:46:00.000-07:00

Lent is almost done and so I'm going to let slip this one wee post. Rod Deher's Crunchy Conservatism has been talked to death on NRO and other US conservative sites. The points he raises are not specific to the U.S., however. With a new conservative government and all, Canadians might want to hash these over. An important point for Canadians to consider in this environment is that the US Republican party is not the criterion of what conservatism is all about. Other examples and traditions do exist. I recently finished Steven Ozment's A Mighty Fortress, which is a history of the German people, and one of the things I took away from it was the role of Christian Democrats as a strong moderating force in that part of the world. You can read some of that story here. The current Merkel led German government might be considered the current heirs to role of the Center party. Rod's points and the German examples I've linked are useful because of the Canadian Tories' minority position in the house. The object of the current government is to use the powers it has wisely, and to show the country that it can be trusted with majority powers down the road. Given the elephant in the living room nature of our relationship with the US and the strong brand of conservatism on display there, Canadian Tories need to be Conservative without being US Republicans in miniature. Canada is not the U.S., and neither is it Germany, but the overlap I see between the Crunchy and the German 'center' speaks to me of universally appealing points we may want to examine. Here is Rod's manifesto: 1. We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly. 2. Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character. 3. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government. 4. Culture is more important than politics and economics. 5. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative. 6. Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract. 7. Beauty is more important than efficiency. 8. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom. 9. We share Russell Kirk’s conviction that “the institution most essential to conserve is the family.” 10. Politics and economics won’t save us; if our culture is to be saved at all, it will be by faithfully living by the Permanent Things, conserving these ancient moral truths in the choices we make in our everyday lives. My two cents: 1. is empty; anyone can make such a claim. It gains us nothing; drop it, it smacks of pretention and elitism. 2. This is very true but needn't be true. 3. Absolutely. 4. In many ways, this is THE theme that has emerged in my thinking as I have steered NWW through the past year +. 5. There is nothing conservative about paving paradise. 6. Remember kids, glass and steel mixed with gargantuanism sucks. 7. and 8. People dead to beauty are not to be trusted. 9. Don't let the left get away with the lie that family protection means entrenched power and abuse. A family is both a collection of people and how they interact. They break the unit into atoms and choose sides; we uphold the union, properly balanced. 10. Don't doubt your ability to impact your community through acts of grace, small and large. Imposed solutions seldom work.

Selecting what is transient

2006-02-20T20:15:00.000-08:00

Die Grosse Stille

"When I left the monastery, I was thinking about what exactly had I lived through and it was realizing that I had had the privilege of living with a community of people who live practically without any fears." ... "We tend to say that our society is driven by consumerism or greed but it's not true. Greed, consumerism, wanting to have a new Porsche, for example, is a disguise of pure fear. It's a near panicking society and that was difficult to accept." Documentary filmaker Phillip Groening to the BBC

Groening made his comments to the Beeb in light of his documentary, Die Grosse Stille. In English it means the big silence and its' subject is life in a Carthusian monastery called Grande Chartreuse. The monks live a regimented life of a kind that I can't really contemplate ever living personally. But I am glad to know that such places exist. I would be pleased to visit and stay awhile; I would understand my own life better, I think. After seeing the film David Warren writes that he think's Groening is on to something. He writes:

This is why the film plays to packed houses. It speaks to people about what they are. I think Mr Groening has astutely diagnosed not merely what is wrong today, with post-Christian Europe and by extension all the West, but why we are due for a terrible tribulation. One that began to unfold in the events of 9/11, and now begins to take a shape in the ludicrous battle over Danish cartoons. Emerging from a fog, our fears resolve into something we can look at. We cling to things that cannot last, out of our curious panic; to things like Porsches, and the nanny state. We ignore, in this panic, anything that isn't hard to the touch - the verities of God, nature, and our nature. Yet in so doing we select what is transient, over what is eternal.

If this film ever makes it's way to a DVD store near me I shall give a look. On the weekend we attended Mass not at our local parish but at a nearby seminary school, where the service is done by Benedictine monks, seminary students and the boys attending the school. The pace was considerably slower than your average parish Mass and the setting was pretty spectacular. It was a large concrete sanctuary with a medieval feel (even if it was completed in 1982) with the sun rising through stained glass and monks' singing. It was like stepping into another planet. I think we will be doing that again. It was wonderful.

Which Polyhedral Are You?

2006-02-17T18:42:00.000-08:00

Take the quiz at dicepool.com

Open source theology

2006-02-16T19:19:00.000-08:00

Over at Rough Type, Nicholas Carr is writing (again) about the Wikkipedia and it's shortcomings. I've been a fan of the Wikkipedia for a while, and have linked to it often in my posts when I want offer a helpful background brief to a reader. It's something I know anyone can access. That said, I've never been of the opinion that it's as good or better than a paid encyclopedia with professional, paid editors - and without pranksters and worse. Carr writes:

The problem with those who would like to use "open source" as a metaphor, stretching it to cover the production of encyclopedias, media, and other sorts of information, is that they tend to focus solely on the "community" aspect of the open source model. They ignore the fact that above the community is a carefully structured hierarchy, a group of talented individuals who play a critical oversight role in filtering the contributions of the community and ensuring the quality of the resulting code. Someone is in charge, and experts do count. The open source model is not a democratic model. It is the combination of community and hierarchy that makes it work. Community without hierarchy means mediocrity.

I simply cannot avoid pointing out that this argument applies to Churches as well. When tradition and authority are decried what results is usually hypocrisy - a church of all believers in which the all accepts that it is a church of all believers because the church authorities have sold them on it. A real church of all believers tends to be disorganized cult, and at worst it leans in this direction. When there is no structure people gravitate to those who are the most charming, and the charming are, in turn, are untrammeled by restrictions. After all, who is anyone else to say they're wrong? This fellow's description of the Catholic preisthood and Pope is quite erroneous. He succumbs to the old charge that a religious class 'intercedes' for people with God. This is false; they are custodians of tradition, which is not saving, but instructive. Because they have no other interests, they can devote themselves to this task in a way that no lay person could. The brightest among them can engage in the study of theology and philosophy and we can all then share in that. Is theology saving? Is philosophy saving? Heck, is reciting the rosary saving? No, to all of that. A priest in his teaching and counseling is simply a specialist in the same way that a doctor, scientist or social worker is. The 'Church of all believers' argument is a sort of iconoclasm, and it fails for much the same reason. Placing yourself before a stature or a picture is not worship of the stature unless you hold that the item itself has some sort of divine power. If it merely serves as an aid to thought, to memory, then that is all that it is. The only thing active in the relationship is the mind and heart of the believer. If clergy can show us an error or a contradiction in our thinking, that is an aid to thinking and not an "intercession" on behalf of someone who is not "good enough" or "smart enough." A specialist, for example, can point out to us that the form of a stature is not the same thing as its content. That is, it is not synonymous with the thing it is intended to represent. Attempting to correct erroneous thinking is exactly what PG Mathews is attempting to do in the article I've linked. The same can be said about prayer. Someone who prays for another - robed or unrobed - is not 'interceding'. Even if it were, the argument would apply to all prayers on behalf of another, not just prayers by clergy. The point here is not to bash other Christians but to try and recognize that churches necessarily have structures and traditions - some more formal than others. The 'all believers' argument is more about shunning rivals than it is an argument about theology. In fact, it's not really an argument at all.

Three good links

2006-02-09T17:48:00.000-08:00

No promises, but here are some links that I thought were good enough to post. I'll even bring them full circle and comment on the cartoon controversy. One) Adam Kirsch writes in the NY Sun about Daniel Dennett's latest book, Breaking the Spell:

Mr. Dennett wrote the book in the first place. He candidly describes him self as a "godless philosopher" and has invented an obviously value laden term, "bright," to describe people like himself who are proudly emancipated from religion. [how nice! -ed] He is careful not to pronounce outright on the existence of God or the truth of any given religion - preferring to argue that what religion needs is not affirmation or denial, but study - but there is no doubt that Mr. Dennett believes the world would be better off if religion disappeared tomorrow. If his actual assertions leave any uncertainty about this, his metaphors and images do not: On the very first page, for instance, he compares human religions to Dicrocelium dendriticum, a parasite that lives in the brain of ants and compels them to irrational, self-destructive behavior. The problem with "Breaking the Spell" is not this frank hostility to religion. On the contrary, there is a long, honorable, and thrilling tradition of atheistic polemics, from Voltaire to Nietzsche and beyond. If anything, one wishes Mr. Dennett were more familiar with this literature and had learned its most important lessons. If he had, perhaps his own attacks on religion and religious people would not sound so much like the complacent broadsides of the village atheist. For the best atheists agree with the best defenders of faith on one crucial point: that the choice to believe or disbelieve is existentially the most important choice of all. It shapes one's whole understanding of human life and purpose, because it is a choice that each of us must make for him or herself. To impress on a man the urgency of that choice, Kierkegaard wrote, it would be useful to "get him seated on a horse and the horse made to take fright and gallop wildly ... this is what existence is like if one is to become consciously aware of it." Mr. Dennett would have benefited from a ride on Kierkegaard's horse. For what dooms his book, not just in literary but in logical terms, is his complete failure to recognize the existential demand of religion. "I decided some time ago," he writes, "that diminishing returns had set in on the arguments about God's existence," and so he leaves God out of his argument entirely. Instead, Mr. Dennett writes about religion as a purely social and empirical phenomenon.

Two: This article by Micheal Kazin, in the left leaning Dissent Magazine, contains a history of twentieth century politics that is sure to be useful today. It serves as an antidote to the widespread practice of viewing and commenting on politics soley through the lens of ideological theory. He writes from the other side of the fence that I sit on, but deserves credit for being pretty fair. Writes Kazin:

Perhaps the most significant reason for the tenacity of public religiosity in U.S. history is the fact that a crusading faith and a democratic polity emerged together and at roughly the same time. Wrote Tocqueville, "Next to each religion is a political opinion that is joined to it by affinity." A leveling faith has dominated American religious life since the Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century, which Tocqueville witnessed. The great revival appealed as much to blacks as to whites, spawned thousands of new Protestant churches, and made the passion of evangelicalism the common discourse of most Americans. In the words of historian Gordon Wood, "As the public became democratized, it became evangelized." The idea that anyone, regardless of learning or social background, could "come to Christ" dovetailed with the belief in equal rights emblazoned both in the Declaration of Independence and the rhetoric of Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln. The synthesis of evangelical Protestantism and the ideology of grassroots democracy was found in no other nation—at least not with such passionate conviction and for such a long period of time. After the early years of the Second Great Awakening, most white Christians turned their backs on its transracial promise and refused to continue worshipping alongside blacks; the latter, both from necessity and pride, founded their own churches. But all embraced a religion that promised to cleanse a sinful world. ... But then a great transition took place. In the quarter-century after the Second World War, the liberal intelligentsia—among whom secular Jews and lapsed Catholics had achieved unprecedented status—viewed the close link between political crusading and evangelical faith to be an anachronism, vital mainly among "extremists" on the right. Billy Graham was no extremist, but his energetic companionship with every president from Eisenhower onward seemed a perfect example of how leaders of mass revivals were also willing to prostitute themselves to the powerful. Prominent liberal Protestant clergymen came to the same conclusion, albeit by different routes. Reinhold Niebuhr, the most respected theologian of the postwar era, argued that no manner of collective awakening could rid the world of sinful institutions or behavior. "[Billy] Graham honestly believes," he scoffed, "that conversion to Christianity will solve the problem of the hydrogen bomb because really redeemed men will not throw the bomb." Meanwhile, activist Protestant ministers on the left, such as William Sloane Coffin, Jr., first an influential chaplain at Yale and later senior minister at New York’s Riverside Church, interpreted their faith almost solely as an ethic of "social action" and "social responsibility." The spiritual majesty was gone. Bryan and his generation of Christian progressives thought of a good conscience as a gift from God, one only a knave or fool would turn down. But liberal Protestants and their secular allies now thought of God as little more than a good conscience.

Three: I'm with this guy. Peter Berkowitz takes on "critical theory" which might not mean anything to you if you were never a literature student, however I'm sure you've encountered these ideas if you read at all widely:

[Critical] Theory's central tenets are few, are neatly summarized, and purport to describe the world as it really is: "There is," as Derrida famously put it, "nothing outside the text." Indeed, all the world is text. Equivalently, what passes for knowledge - not only in literature but throughout the humanities, social sciences, and even the natural sciences - is socially constructed, or a text that is collectively authored. Texts are radically indeterminate and inevitably self-subverting. No author can successfully inscribe his or her intention in a text or convey meaning through literature. Every text is no more and no less than what a reader makes of it. Cultural studies - the examination of how hierarchy and subordination are produced and performed in everything from mundane habits, mass media, and popular culture to international relations and theoretical physics - is the highest form of intellectual inquiry, and because all the world is text, literary theorists are its consummate practitioners. It might appear that nothing in particular follows from these propositions for politics, or that what follows is that in politics, as in the interpretation of literature, anything goes... The particulars of Theory's transformative agenda remain murky. But the tendency is plain. The vast majority of causes that Theory's proponents champion involve the demand for the liberation of imagination and desire from the allegedly false and malevolent limitations imposed by two constitutive elements of the West. One oppressor is the tradition of rational thought from Socrates and Plato through the Enlightenment and its contemporary heirs. The other is the Western tradition of individual liberty and equality under law as developed and instituted in the West but especially in the United States. Indeed, to reconcile Theory's affirmation of the radical indeterminacy of texts with its claim that such indeterminacy generates an emancipatory and typically egalitarian political program, one would have to suspend the ordinary laws of reason - recognized, contrary to Theory's extreme pronouncements, not only in the West but around the globe and from time immemorial. If texts are all there is and the world is nothing but a text, if moral and political standards like everything else are constructed and not discovered, why shouldn't the strong and ruthless regard themselves as emancipated to rewrite other people’s lives in whatever ways that strike their fancy and that they can get away with?

Going full circle, here is the conclusion of Adam Kirsch's take down of Dennet:

Mr. Dennett is left, then, with two aporias. The first is that, as we have all learned, you cannot move from an "is" to an "ought": in this case, from the assertion that religion evolved to the prescription that we stop practicing it. Any ethical exhortation, and that is what "Breaking the Spell" boils down to, must employ ethical arguments, which means arguments about truth and human flourishing. These are the kinds of arguments that serious atheists have dared to make: that religious belief is a dereliction of our ethical responsibility, an affront to our intellectual honor. Mr. Dennett surely believes this as well, but his failure to argue it leaves his atheism looking like just another prejudice. The second, and more important, dilemma for Mr. Dennett is that there are kinds of truth the positivist cannot measure. At the heart of organized religion, whether one accepts or rejects it, is the truth that metaphysical experience is part of human life. Any adequate account of religion must start from this phenomenological fact. Because Mr. Dennett ignores it, treating religion instead as at best a pastime for dimwits, at worst a holding cell for fanatics, he never really encounters the thing he believes he is writing about.

The point of all this is that Liberal / Secular / Material arguments about how they are remaking the world but those darn hidebound religious conservatives keep getting in the way are so much hogwash. First, they are dishonest and confused, most of them, about their own relationship to metaphysics - which any attempt at reform must rely on. Secondly, this confusion allows them to say horrific and apocalyptic things about their opponents (take a bow Paul Martin and Micheal Herle). Of which, I am not. I am in favour of people seeking reform, and being aware that this is logically dependent on a metaphysics of some sort. I favour doing so without tearing down and mocking those who simply have a somewhat different metaphysics from which to start. If we are historically aware, the greatest things the west has accomplished have come about through this sort of dialogue. The floor here is humble respect for your opponent. The ceiling is - well, that's what they debate is all about, isn't it? The real and ugly opponent in all of this is not so much right or left, religious or secular. It is being in the dark about our metaphysical assumptions and how that darkness leads to cursing and hating others for not being mirror images of ourselves. It is the polar opposite of humilty. Using the cartoons of the Mohammed that have caused such a stink in the middle east as an example, there is nothing wrong with taking offense at the cartoons. There is everything wrong with acting on that offense with violence directed at anyone and anything that is different, including those who have nothing to do with their creation or publication. Were the cartoons offensive? Should they have been published? Those are questions that it is profitable to debate. Debate requires that such things can both be published and that non violent responses be permitted. A blanket ban on them stifles debate, as does the suggestion that they are nothing more than funny hats and smelly food - ie. they are nothing but a private concern. Another question that cannot be overlooked in all of this is who brought the cartoons back out of the musty closet they had fallen into, and why now? Qui Bono from this bit religious manipulation? Because republishing them to this effect has to have consequences too.

The pause that refreshes

2006-02-06T17:27:00.000-08:00

This is a post that I really didn't want to write, but I'm now trying to look at it a bit longer term and remain positive about it. I'm putting NWW on hiatus, probably until the end of Lent (that would be Easter). It's been very apparent to me, and probably to any long term readers that I have, that my interests have been elsewhere of late. I had hoped to make it until my second blogging anniversary in August but it's only early February now and I can see that that isn't going to happen. I'm not pulling the plug on the site but taking a much longer break than I have allowed myself to take thus far. It's possible I'll wind it down then but that is not my intent. Maybe by then I'll have some new books under my belt to share, and the editor's block that has been my nemesis for a while now will be in retreat. I hope so, anyway.

For all you do

2006-02-05T19:28:00.000-08:00

This trophy is for you, zebras: Worst super bowl refereeing I can recall. Let's review. Bogus "pushing off" call robs Seattle of touchdown number one. Pittsburgh touchdown number one does not clearly get into the endzone. In the second half a "holding" call takes Seattle from 1st and goal on the one to first and 20 on the 30. This call not only robs Seattle of a very likely TD, it leads up to a forced throw that is intercepted and ultimately it gives Pittsburgh a TD. I should have shut the TV off at this point as any hope of enjoying this contest was gone. On the interception I just mentioned the refs also had the gall to call Hasselbeck for a "low block" when in fact he made the tackle. There's no such thing as a "low tackle." That's a fourteen point swing at a minimum, and it could easily be a twenty-one point difference since scoring a TD from the one is a very high percentage play. There's an awful lot of garbage that comes along with the superbowl every year, and I don't just mean the roman numerals. If you guessed the Rolling Stones, you're getting warmer. NFL football is the only sport that I watch for recreation as I figure too much sports is very good way to waste a great deal of time. It's good - one game a week for roughly twenty weeks. That's a pace I can handle. Compare the NHL with something upwards of five million meaningless games every week for month after month. I ditched that years ago and have no regrets. Vancouver who? The Calgary what? I don't care. But waiting thirty one years to have a mismatched zebra team screw it up about as bad as they could? Nope. We'll see if I'm back next year. I enjoy the sport, so maybe I'll cool down. Then again, think of all the other things I could do with Sunday afternoons. Maybe if the zebra teams are kept together through the playoffs. Maybe.

Tao of Grace

2006-02-01T20:31:00.000-08:00

One Cosmos remains one of the more interesting blogs I've found of late. Today "Gagdad Bob" is writing about Taoism. I read the Tao Te Ching more than a few years ago, during university and also after when I was dating a girl who was rather hard left. This was long before I knew anything much about Christianity or even considered it worth looking at. You can imagine how pleased (and surprised!) she was when I (oh so delicately!) tried to tell her that it was not compatible with her political beliefs. You might stop and wonder how can anything be compatible with an every changing amalgam of anarchism and communism? You might give yourself an aneurism trying to reconcile just those two things, never mind adding a third element, but that would be to get ahead of things here. Do the aneurism on your own time, please. Writes Bob:

wu wei is one of the central concepts of Taoism. Although literally translated as "non-doing" or "non action," it is probably more accurately thought of as 'not forcing." The apocryphal writer of the Tao Te Ching, Lau-tzu, gained his insights by simply observing the way nature worked. Nature doesn't "do" anything, and yet it gets everything done in a most efficient way. Non-action means living in accord with the way things are, for example, in the way that water naturally overcomes whatever is in its way and flows toward its destination. It doesn't mean that you don’t cut the wood, but that you cut it along the grain--you don't force things. ... Non-doing means not acting in the way you would like things to be, but in terms of the way they are. In other words, it means acting in accord with objective truth, with the natural order of things, not with mere opinion. It means living in alignment with with pre-existent reason--with the logos.

I think this is a very wise way to look at things, and quite irreconcilable with social engineering, from full blown communism's "new man" through "new government" to silly PC-isms like quota hiring, so why she glammed on it I have no idea. Bob:

The principles of the Tao are very much at odds with contemporary left-liberalism, which forever tries to impose order and outcomes, as opposed to classical liberalism, which trusts that the chaos of liberty spontaneously leads to a higher and much more robust order. For example, the Tao states, "I let go of economics, and people become prosperous." "When taxes are too high, people go hungry." "When the government is too intrusive, people lose their spirit." "If you don't trust the people, you make them untrustworthy." "Try to make people happy, and you lay the groundwork for misery." "Stop trying to control. Let go of fixed plans and concepts, and the world will govern itself." Leftists hate the idea that there is infinitely more embodied wisdom in a free market than in the shrewd sophistry of Paul Krugman, and that most societal problems will solve themselves if you allow them to. Indeed, many of our most troubling contemporary problems are a result of some meddling liberal "solution" that was put in place 30, 40, or 50 years ago.

Bob, however, goes too far when he links president Bush's governance with Taoist minimalism. Most conservatives, admirers and naysyers, will admit that Bush Jr. is not a small government man in the mold of, say, Ronald Regan. It's true that Bush appears to be skepictal about some nostrums near and dear to certain intellectuals but there's no denying that he is beholden to certain other intellectuals. How does one square nation building in the middle east with hands off governance? Beats me. Perhaps my ex, like Bob, saw only what she opposed as being forced. If she was for it, then it was natural; in her mind it took the form of "I'm for what's natural." easy mistake to make, but a harder one to recognize. Which way does the cosmic wood grain run? Bob goes on to get a little mystical, a bit philosophical:

Perhaps the ultimate lesson of Taoism is that language can introduce all sorts of redundancies into existence. We do not "have" an experience. We are experience. Experience is an encounter between a knower and known, but in reality, knower and known are simply two sides of the same coin: there is no knower without a known, and no knowledge without a knower. External and internal reality are bound together by a mysterious process that we do not understand, and to which we add nothing by escaping into some symbolic representation of it.

Indulge me as I play the annoying philosopher, but isn't the suggestion that "there is no knower without a known, and no knowledge without a knower" exactly the kind of redundancy one might expect language to give rise to? My view is that we are social by nature and as a result we need language in much the same way that we need houses and clothing. Those are extentions of a human or humans. They are like an arm or a leg. We can survive without them, but we are greatly aided by having them. There is a real charm and insight that arises from this point of view - another example is that the beaver's dam is an extention of the beaver itself - but there is a danger as well. The biological ideas I gleaned from Richard Dawkins' Extended Phenotype, and simply extended the idea to include language. In both instances - The Tao and Dawkins' book - the threat is to the autonomy of the individual, which is in danger of being nothing more than a neutral place where something happens. My own argument would be to seek a middle ground. Language exists in all human societies, and - I'm willing to bet - there exists in all of those languages a subject / object distinction. The widespread existence of that metaphysic in disparate circumstances leads me to give it a great deal of weight. There is something here, something normative. The "I" is not a mere quirk. If this basic relational metaphysic is true, then there are likely others as well. The key term is "relational." Metaphysics is about relationships, which is why it slips by when we focus narrowly on me, myself and I, and what I can see, touch and count. The subject / object distinction is prior to measurement, for example. You have to recognize something as "not me" before it occurs to you to investigate it purely through physical means. If the "I" is real, however, so is the dependence on a social network. We can't champion one over the other without injuring ourselves. Which brings me back to the subject at hand - what is nature? And what is 'control' or 'force'? It's too simple and too easy to wrap ourselves in 'nature' and accuse others of 'forcing it'. Isn't doing that simply trying to give reign to our own 'I' and buck the constraints of somebody else's? Isn't the sum of those other 'I's' something we might call our community? In my own tradition we understand nature in light of what is called natural right, and there is a lot of complex thinking and writing about what that is and is not. Some of a more antinomian mindset find that school of thought controlling, but as I've tried to show, and as the Wikki entry mentions, the charge itself is problematic. There don't appear to be any easy answers. The one that comes to me is simply ongoing negotiation, trusting that Grace will prevail among those who think they have it and those who deny it that it exists.

Rights vs. contracts

2006-01-31T19:56:00.000-08:00

At TCS, Edward Fesser's essay on natural right has been followed up by Max Borders. Borders takes the view that rights do not exist as real, metaphysical entities, but are the result of agreements or "contracts." Now, Fesser has penned a response to Borders' arguments. I linked to the first Fesser essay here. I will give Fesser the floor once again tonight because I think this is an immensely important topic. We live in a world of "enlightenment" positivism run amok, where there are no shortage of highly educated, intelligent people whose main beef with realist metaphysics seems to be that it is inconvenient and therefore unnecessary (note the order of those propositions). We also live in a world in which new technologies are making the real world implications of our metaphysical propositions - of which positivism is surely one - are more and more far reaching. So I think it is increasingly important that schemes like the one Borders' outlines be given a very long, hard look. Our educational specialization works against us here and I think we need to, as modern democrats, give the subject more attention than we do. Slogans hurled every four years will not do. In mulling over Fesser's work, here are some real word examples to keep in mind, in addition to those he lists. Today, the largest murder trial in Canadian history started in our courts. Willie Pickton stands charged with twenty seven counts of first degree murder. If he is found guilty, what is his social standing under a contractarian ethics? What about those being held long term in Guantanamo Bay? Our efforts to have all the benefits of a sophisticated ethics without a complex metaphysics are probably also behind Canada's recent supreme court ruling on the legality of swinger's clubs. Can one consent to anything or do we have a duty to one another to avoid really big mistakes? These issues strike clear across traditional lines of right and left and force us to ask ourselves what we are. What we owe one another - if anything - flows from that. The traditional Catholic position has been that since man is "made in the image of God", that we simply cannot do whatever we want to do to others (or ourselves), no matter how much we dislike them or feel threatened by them. As inconvenient as that metaphysics might be, I think the implications of overturning it are much worse. "The implication that there are human beings whose lack of participation in the social contract puts them outside the boundaries of morality is what is really troubling about contractarianism," writes Fesser, "for it entails that there are no moral constraints whatsoever on what we might do to such people."

Borders insists that the fact that there might be an occasional "defector" from the social contract "doesn't mean we ever have a positive duty to 'boil people alive.'" But that is a red herring, because the question isn't whether we must harm those who are outside the social contract, but whether we may in theory do so if we want to, and the contractarian has no basis whatsoever for denying that we may. He must acknowledge that, at least in principle, if you knew for certain that a person is utterly unwilling sincerely to enter into the social contract, then even if he hasn't in fact harmed you or anyone else, there would be no moral reason not to kill, torture, mutilate, rape, or otherwise to abuse him just for kicks, if you had a hankering to do so. Contractarians try to dance around this disturbing consequence by insisting that the scenario is purely hypothetical, and that in real-life circumstances we have prudential reasons to abide by conventions forbidding people from taking it upon themselves to decide whether someone is outside the contract. But that the theory allows for this sort of possibility even in the abstract should be enough to give us pause. Moreover, there are, of course, many people who have in fact hurt others, and thereby shown themselves either to have broken the social contract or never to have been a sincere party to it at all. So may we punish them just any way we like? If someone is guilty of stealing a radio, can we execute him, or cut his ears off and force-feed them to him? Again, the contractarian will no doubt say that we have good pragmatic grounds for not allowing such excessive punishments, but this misses the point. The problem is that the contractarian has no way of showing that such excessive punishments are flatly unjust in principle. Here we see plainly that contractarianism isn’t really a defense of morality or justice as we know them in everyday life, but rather an attempt to replace morality and justice with something loosely resembling them for most practical purposes. We see this even more starkly when we consider another common objection to contractarianism, namely that it seems to entail that we have no moral duties to those who cannot plausibly be participants in a social contract between rationally self-interested persons seeking their mutual advantage -- such as the mentally ill, the handicapped, the unborn, infants, and others who either do not know what is in their rational self-interest, or cannot either benefit or threaten other rationally self-interested persons and so have nothing to offer them in return for being left alone. Some contractarians deal with this problem by suggesting that we can have duties not to harm these sorts of people because they matter to other people: your baby or your grandmother with Alzheimer's, for example, matter to you, and since you are a sane and healthy adult who can be a party to the social contract, other people should respect your wishes by leaving them alone. Then there are pragmatic grounds for not allowing infanticide and the like, which might have untoward social costs. And so forth. Again, though, the contractarian has to say that it could at least in principle be morally innocuous to strangle an infant or a homeless schizophrenic just because you felt like it, as long as there was no one else to whom these people mattered. These human beings can have no value or standing unless others decide to give them value or standing, whether for sentimental reasons or pragmatic ones. Now these implications are disturbing enough that most contractarians acknowledge them only tersely and obliquely, cheerfully emphasizing instead the many wonderful opportunities for "mutual benefit" there are for the sane, able-bodied, and adult consumers who constitute most of their readership.

Great philospohy

2006-01-27T09:02:00.000-08:00

The Maverick Philosopher has revisited the question of theism / atheism and its relationship to the ability to do philosophical work of the higest caliber. When I first took a look at his list of the "top twenty philosophers" I immediately wanted to strike Sartre from the list for being more of a imfamous celebrity than a serious thinker, but then Bill wrote:

On the score of truth, Fritz Nietzsche really falls short. For not only is there little if any philosophical truth in his writings, the poor soul denies the very existence of truth. When one studies the first seven on the list, one actually learns something about the world. But when one reads Nietzsche and (later) Wittgenstein, one learns highly original and fascinating opinions that have little or no chance of being true. One learns from them, and from some others on the list, how NOT to do philosophy. But that too is something worth knowing!

I saw that about Nietschze right away, as I think one can use his criticisms provided one has enough faith to keep from following him into nihilism. I still think Sartre is the poor boy on this list, even conceeding Bill his point. Otherwise, I generally like his list and his conclusion.

Job number one?

2006-01-27T08:41:00.000-08:00

Rosie DiManno at the Toronto Star disagrees with me:

the objective for Stephen Harper is not to govern with panache now, within the admittedly straitening parameters of minority rule, but to position himself such that he can secure a majority in the next election, which is apparently Job 1. Thus, to make the Tories more palatable to all those millions who preferred the Liberals and the NDP, Harper should break the presumed covenant he made with those Canadians who provided his party with its current mandate, and did so with a tapestry of support from coast to coast, leaving only Prince Edward Island unrepresented in caucus. Plus the country's three biggest cities, of course — Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver — where voters turned up their noses and rejected all Tory supplicants. This, the tall foreheads tell us, is the subtext of the election outcome — illusory power, checked by Canadian caution, translated as a warning not to boldly implement the very policies that Harper campaigned on, already modified toward a more centrist sensibility, or at least not unless he tempers them further to appease voters (and parliamentary opposition) who instinctively recoil from Harper's vision of a different Canada. We are a nation of compromise, which is all fine and well. But endless compromise can also amount to stagnation and timidity, an absence of purpose, so that you end up standing for nothing except bland platitudes. The view from here is that Harper ought not imitate the prime minister he's replacing — condemned to mere footnote status in history now — by governing defensively and diluting political principles, terrified of provoking a vote of non-confidence and prepared to whore himself for the sake of holding onto power. Either the platform, as thoroughly outlined on the campaign trail, will find sufficient favour with Canadians in application or it won't. Better to be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.

Of course I never said that style, guts and panache are un-Canadian. All I said was don't do a clutzy Rambo; do think long term. Very long term.

Practical Tories are long lived Tories

2006-01-26T11:07:00.000-08:00

In this excellent post, Liberty Corner shares his definition of what liberty is, and why liberty is not aligned with the atomizing society or with groupthink:

The core of libertarianism is liberty: briefly, the negative right to be left alone - in one's person, pursuits, and property - as long as one leaves others alone. The problem with all such formulations, however, is that they gloss over two important questions: 1. What is harm and who defines it? 2. How does one ensure that one is "left alone" in a world where there are predators and parasites who will not subscribe voluntarily to a pact of mutual restraint? ... In summary: Liberty rests on an agreed definition of harm, and on an accompanying agreement to act with mutual restraint and in mutual defense. Given the variety of human wants and preferences, the price of mutual restraint and mutual defense is necessarily some loss of liberty. That is, each person must accept, and abide by, a definition of harm that is not the definition by which he would abide were he able to do so. But, in return for mutual restraint and mutual defense, he must abide by that compromise definition.

This is a more sophisticated look at the question than Canada's Supreme Court managed not too long ago. Harm is not an objective thing, but a negotiated idea. Positing one's own definition as "objective" - as the court did - is insulting to the group dynamics of a healthy culture. In a healthy political culture, individuals meet in mind boggling number of forms to endlessly negotiate questions like these, and others. What does it mean to be human? What rights and obligations do we have to one another? How do we balance the claims of groups vs. individuals? etc. These are social and relational questions and should be answered as such, both in the law, and also in how the law is derived. The most powerful groups in these negotiations are our courts and legislatures. Unilaterally saying that "the debate is over and we won" is despotic, not liberal, and it is despotic on both fronts. As J.S. Mill wrote, as I quoted before:

Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of; else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty.

It is telling in the extreme, I believe, that of the three major Federal parties in English Canada ONLY the Tory party believes in the merits of free votes. The NDP believes in voting as a whipped block, and the Liberals, shrewd operators that they are, choose to whip only their cabinet - which is nothing less than a whip by proxy. If you are a politico with any ambition (and are there any other kinds?), you will know what to do. Now, faced with a new government whose supporters are almost unified in their opposition to black robed declarations about what a free society can debate in it's highest chambers, how do we respond? The clumsy and wrong answer is to pass a law that the court has indicated that it will likely strike down, and to simply dare it to do so. The merits of the proposed law are only one fact to consider. We also want to pass it in a manner that is conducive to the open society that is our aim. As I said in my post on Toryism the other day, I will be looking to see that our Tory government acts with this kind of prudence in its' laws and in its' appointments. We can look to the example of the Liberal party over the last thirty years, who have adroitly managed to normalize parts of their agenda that seemed unlikely back then. The Liberals have had some luck in the form of technological advances like the Internet that have demystified things like SS attractions. We might get help in the future in the form of younger generations resenting the price that recent reforms are asking them to bear. The fruits of endless family experimentation might just be solid factual evidence that traditional families have a lot to recommend them. Wait for it, and in the meantime exert quiet, negotiated, acceptable changes when and where you can. Another example of this approach can be seen in our neighbors to the south:

One conclusion is that the confirmation of both Chief Justice John Roberts and Judge Alito marks the most important domestic success for President Bush since his 2003 tax cuts. These look like legacy picks. Despite the Harriet Miers misstep, Mr. Bush has now fulfilled one of his campaign promises. And with two distinguished conservative jurists joining Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, the Court is closer than it's been in 50 years to having a majority that can restore Constitutional interpretation to its founding principles. In this sense, the Alito-Roberts ascendancy also marks a victory for the generation of legal conservatives who earned their stripes in the Reagan Administration. The two new Justices are both stars of that generation - many others are scattered throughout the lower courts - and they are now poised to influence the law and culture for 20 years or more.

There are no guarantees here but mature and sober people know that there never are. We have to be prepared to accept that in the sort of society Liberty Corner espouses, no one gets exactly what they want. Reconciling one's self to that is an act of love we should be prepared to make. Finally, I want to make the point that I am not compromising my beliefs in arguing as I am. I am in fact arguing from them, but have resisted going into it because I'm well aware that any mention of religion alarms and turns off some people, perhaps due to a bad experience or ignorance. Pope Ratzinger released his first encyclical yesterday, Deus Caritas Est,which Fr. Raymond DeSouza summarizes in today's National Post. Even if you only read this little snippet from DeSouza, you can see that respect for others - including those who dissent from our views - is well regarded in this tradition:

The central point is that love - which the Greeks called eros - has a possessive nature that requires the possession of the beloved by the lover. This erotic love, if not purified, can seek to dominate the other and ends up reducing the other to a mere object of desire. The answer is not to eliminate eros, which is good in itself, but to complement and complete it with another type of love, for which the Greek New Testament uses the word agape. Agape is self-sacrificing love, in which the lover offers himself for the good of the beloved. The deepest revelation of God's love is precisely this agape, in which Jesus on the cross lays down his life for those he loves.

iTunes U

2006-01-26T09:09:00.000-08:00

The future continues to look promising. As someone who can't attend expensive classes, having access to cheap, portable audio materials would be great. Se also here.

Woo!

2006-01-25T13:04:00.000-08:00

I'm heartened to see that yesterday's post on Toryism has been getting a good response. Rod Dreher, who writes for the Dallas Morning News and who's former job was being editor of National Review Online, dropped in to say something nice about it. Now Mark Shea has linked it. See also here and here.

Election reflection

2006-01-24T14:10:00.000-08:00

Rebuilding Toryism Toryism at it's best, is in my estimation the best and least threatening school of democratic political thought. What? you say! What about those crazy fundamentalists? What about those heartless Libertarians? What about those oil mad Albertans? What about....? What about...? Toryism is a broad based idea, just like Liberalism, and as such it recognizes the necessity of coalition building. It needs to be a BIG tent, one that any Canadian could proudly and comfortably park themselves under. Reconciling those groups is no small feat but Toryism has the advantage of being at heart a very pragmatic idea. It might be summed up by the old saying that "old boots and old friends are best." Meaning, in other words, that in the absence of compelling evidence of a need for change, the best course is one of stewardship, consultation and incremental change of the two steps forward, one step back sort. This is hardly threatening stuff. There is a long (and dishonorable) tradition in debating of taking the weakest or most extreme part of your opponents' plan or argument, and using it to represent the whole of what is being argued against. When political parties begin to fail they begin to do this to themselves. If the Tories allow one of their core constituencies to define who they are - as has happened in the recent past - then the charges above will begin to have some merit. I do not think this can be said of Stephen Harper, who has broadened and expanded the Tory tent tremendously in a very short time. He united Canada's right when the pundits said it could not be done. He has made real inroads in reaching out to Quebec, and I believe he will continue to do so. His victory speech last night gave every indication that that is the course he intends to pursue. If I could give Stephen Harper two books to consider as he goes forward, they would be Roger Scruton's The Meaning of Conservatism, and Crunchy Cons, by Rod Dreher. A taste of the later can be found in this famous NRO article:

Boston College professor Peter Kreeft discovered this phenomenon a few years ago. Kreeft said he and three friends fit John Courtney Murray's four American political types: radical, liberal, traditionalist, and conservative. One day, Kreeft, a traditional Catholic, discovered a close affinity with the Marxist atheist in the group. What did it was driving around Cambridge and judging everyone's reaction to a new housing development the conservative Republican had moved into. It was clean, well lighted, green, and spacious, with attractive amenities. Kreeft and his friend Dick, the radical, thought it was an abomination, because it was ugly and therefore inhuman. The conservative said the fact that they cared about how the place looked marked them as "artsy-fartsy," but the traditionalist and the radical argued that beauty was one of the most important things there is. Soon, Kreeft and his radical friend found out that despite the gulf that separated them on politics, they shared a number of areas of agreement (suburbs bad; nature good; big business and big government bad; small business and small government good). Kreeft determined from this that "beneath the current political left-right alignments there are fault lines embedded in the crust of human nature that will inevitably open up some day and produce earthquakes that will change the current map of the political landscape."

The weirdest thing about this quote is that the so called Marxist thought aesthetics mattered. I mean, the Russian communists aren't exactly renowned for their architecture. Didn't they say that beauty was just bourgeois hangover? In any case, if our Marxist friend is alienated from consumer society and grasping for a means to articulate it, he should be courted by Tories. We ought to be a party that embraces people first and that regards ideology as a smorgasbord from which we pick and choose, and balance and counterbalance, in an effort to create healthy communities in which alienation, and not mere criticism, is minimal. The two things are very different. Alienation is the fruit of poisoned relations, while criticism springs from ongoing healthy negotiation. The Dreher outlook is not well represented in the Tory party as it stands today if we are to look for a majority government in the future we will need to reach out to it. If we do that, I'm certain we can gain substantial support in Canada's cities, where we had a tough time last night. Opening up the tent to this group could garner support from Liberals and, even more encouragingly, from the NDP. Whatever I think of some NDP policies, I certainly recognize the NDP as being (in it's own fashion) an ethically charged party. We can and should appeal to that. None of this is to say that Toryism has no principles at all. Toryism's principles are not synonymous with free market economics or with full blown Christianity. It's principles are healthy people and communities. It is built on nurturing harmonious human relations. A Tory government ought to be viewed as a safe steward and servant of those things, offering a mature and even hand to all. If we draw on economics or religion from time to time, it is because think they offer something useful, and not because we are zealots.

I said earlier that when political parties fail draw from a large base of support, it is because they allow one or more interest groups to dominate them in such a way that what had been a disreputable straw man characterization begins to become credible. They begin to become are parody of themselves. This clearly happened to the Liberals under Paul Martin. Long time readers will be well aware of the great antipathy that I have for his leadership skills. He may be the nice man that those close to him say he is, but he is no leader. He split his party against itself and lost capable supporters as a result. Even worse, he gave free reign to that wing of the party that currently goes by the name of 'progressivism' . In other words, he and the Liberal party as it stands today were the ones guilty of everything they were accusing Stephen Harper of - of being small tent extremists, unable and unwilling to reach out, to listen, and to accommodate real and respectable differences that exist in this country. Whatever the merits of 'progressivism' might be, they do not absolve Martin from blame that he stupidly narrowed the base of support in his party to the point that no longer represented people who once parked themselves there, but who had a somewhat different agenda. I am, frankly, surprised that the Liberals did as well as they did last night. I had been hoping they might be reduced to near historic lows (perhaps 40 - 50 seats, mostly in the east) and that the Tories and the NDP would pick up the pieces. There are many reasons for this, not just the fact that I think Martin's lack of principle deserved more of an ass kicking than it got. Writing in the National Post today, Fr. Raymond DeSouza wrote:

If it meant embarrassing himself with petty outbursts against the Americans, even after promising to improve Canada - US relations, he [Martin] would do it. If it meant allowing his chief of staff to negotiate tawdry deals to induce opposition MPs to cross the floor, he would do it. If it meant trafficking cabinet seats to win a non confidence vote, he would do it... And finally, if it meant conducting a near maniacal election campaign - disgorging smears, proposing constitutional amendments on the fly, playing fast and loose with national unity, and descending into a caricature of the man who will say anything to win vote - then he would do it in spades, and have the chutzpah to declare that this was an election about his values.

That people voted for this man's party after all of that (and more!) speaks to our failure as Tories to provide them with a safe shelter from storms like this. Could you imagine Martin faced with a unity referendum? We must not allow ourselves to become a parody of our own selves, such that voters feel they have no choice, they have to hold their nose and vote for the only party that might listen to them. We must remain broad and not become so beholden to one group or idea that we begin to apologize for being what we are. We must banish the 'small c' apology forever; it is a blatant admission that we think the party as a whole is beholden to something we are not. Tories must not take anything for granted now. Proceed slowly and confidently; I hope Mr. Harper will choose his cabinet and his appointments with care. The more broadly placed and articulate they are, the more that mainstream Canada will have a chance to become aquainted with what Toryism has to offer. We must play good defense and recognize that simply keeping the Liberals from forming the government will go a long way towards marginalizing their left wing and thereby shifting the debate on grounds favourable to us. I remain a social conservative but one who knows that strong, tall trees grow from the ground up, and that government is not always the proper place to put all of our hopes and aspirations. Reshaping Canada's political debates such that those two points alone are prominent and credible would be a big improvement on the statism that has been so prominent in post war Canada. That's do-able. That would have a lasting positive impact.

Go your own way

2006-01-23T09:08:00.000-08:00

Althouse sticks up for us men folk. I do like having the smart women on my side, and willing to put up with some of our more bearable eccentricities. So... she won't mind if we enjoy these clips then:

I saved the best one for last, of course. Seedlings has his list here, which was inspirational.

Blog on

2006-01-21T10:09:00.000-08:00

Here are two really interesting blogs. If you like NWW, I'm sure you'll enjoy these:

One Cosmos, home to a very good writer with a book to flog.
Analyzer, yet another philosophy Ph.D. with a great blog.

Here are some philosphy jokes taken from one of the Analyzer's posts:

Don't put Descartes before the horse. One day Descartes walked into a pub and ordered a coffee. The server asked him, "Do you want that with cream and sugar?" Descartes answered, "I think not", and abruptly ceased to exist. What did the pantheist say to the hot dog vendor? ... Make me one with everything. Have you heard about the dyslexic insomniac agnostic? ... He lies awake at night wondering if there is a dog. Who's the most egotistal type of person conceivable? ... A pantheistic solipsist.

If you liked those you're probably a philosphy nerd just like me.

I'm a Tory

2006-01-19T18:55:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Andrew at BBG (note the new address) for the tip to this Globe and Mail quiz designed to help you figure out what party you should support. I scored 6 for the Conservatives and 1 for the Greens. I suspect the Green tally came on the education question. The zeros on the Liberal and NDP are a little distressing. Don't you guys even want me to consider you? For any issue? Do we really need to "nationalize" everything? How do you square that with supporting diversity and dissent? And even if you did have a policy that I really liked you have zero chance with me until you at least allow MP's to vote their conscience on issues like marriage and abortion. Frankly, those two parties are a huge disappointment. Again. Btw, since every party now receives money for every vote they get, voters frustrated with their choices now have a new method of getting the parties' attention. If you're willing to spoil your ballot, you can simply write down "no candidate supports X", where X is the issue you want to draw attention to. Party scrutineers will get the message if you can convince others to do the same. Each spoiled ballot represents not only a lost vote, but also money lost for the next campaign. It's food for thought if you have no candidate you can support. Even if you're frustrated, you have a chance to be heard on Monday.

Quartet

2006-01-18T19:23:00.000-08:00

Tagged! By Carlton at Upper Canada Catholic. The 'Quartet Meme" Four jobs I have had in my life:

Driving instructor
Book store clerk
Video store clerk
Paper boy

Four movies I could watch over and over, and have:

Master and Commander
The Lord of the Rings
The Mission
Braveheart

Four places I have lived:

In my parents' house
In an apartment
In a larger apartment
In my own house

Four TV shows I love to watch:

Law and Order
Lost
Numbers
... Um, really don't like TV very much!

Four places I have been on vacation:

Germany
Death Valley
Las Vegas
Tofino (Vancouver Island)

Four websites I visit daily (sorry, Canada)

Four favourite foods:

steak and beer
coffee and chocolate
french toast
hamburger and mashed potatoes (it's German)

Four places I would rather be right now:

There's no place like home.

Are you a heretic?

2006-01-18T17:31:00.000-08:00

Great quiz. Well, I thought it was great, but then I think theology is not only interesting, but important.

You scored as Chalcedon compliant. You are Chalcedon compliant. Congratulations, you're not a heretic. You believe that Jesus is truly God and truly man and like us in every respect, apart from sin. Officially approved in 451.

Chalcedon compliant

100%

Modalism

67%

Pelagianism

33%

Monophysitism

33%

Monarchianism

33%

Nestorianism

17%

Apollanarian

Arianism

Adoptionist

Docetism

Gnosticism

Albigensianism

Socinianism

Donatism

Are you a heretic? created with QuizFarm.com

What is evangelicalism?

2006-01-16T19:45:00.000-08:00

My question to readers about Mark Noll has drawn only one response thus far, but what helpful response! I've finally gotten around to reading the link Ian provided. I find the term 'Evangelical' to be frustratingly vague. It tells me very little about the beliefs of the person I am dealing with. The Wikkipeida entry wasn't much help either. This is taken from a review of Mark Noll's Is the Reformation Over? The author, Carl Trueman, a Reform churchman, is not as optimistic as Noll about the prospects for a post Reformation Church:

To cut to the chase: what is evangelicalism? It is a title I myself identify with on occasion, especially when marking myself off from liberalism, another ill-defined, amorphous, transdenominational concept. But in a world where there are "evangelicals" who deny justification by faith as understood by the Protestant Reformers, who deny God's comprehensive knowledge of the future, who deny penal substitutionary atonement, who deny the Messianic self-consciousness of Christ, who have problems with the Nicene Creed, who deny the Chalcedonian definition of Christ's person, who cannot be trusted to make clear statements on homosexuality, and who advocate epistemologies and other philosophical viewpoints which are entirely unprecedented in the history of the orthodox Christian church, it is clear that the term "evangelical" and its cognates, without any qualifying adjective, such as "confessional" or "open" or "post-conservative", is in danger of becoming next to meaningless. And, even when one qualifies the noun in these ways, it is not immediately clear that one is then talking about subsets or modifications of a single, overarching, coherent movement. Indeed, there are many ways in which I, as a confessional, Reformed Christian, have far more in common with many Roman Catholic theologians than others who routinely claim the title of evangelical. After all, there are evangelicals who repudiate almost all the cardinal points of faith which Protestants and Catholics at the Reformation held in common and which were never disputed. Mark Noll is obviously not such, and his own vision of evangelicalism is clearly a gracious, thoughtful, orthodox and in many ways attractive one; but I am not convinced that the definition of evangelicalism which underlies this book is strong enough to enable the realization of that vision or to allay my fears about the movement as a whole, if indeed it is meaningful to speak of it as a single movement. The key to understanding evangelicalism in relation to Catholicism seems to me to lie in part in understanding the crucial difference between the Catholic Church as an institution with clearly defined doctrinal commitments, and evangelicalism as a broad, trans-institutional movement with a vested interest in framing its doctrinal commitments at the level of complexity which the coalition can sustain. The result is that evangelicalism as a movement will always tend towards an ideal of mere Christianity. And that is fine, providing it is understood that this will in turn always tend to attenuate evangelicalism's connection to the past and thus limit its capacity to draw coherently upon that past. In this context, one might add that the current predilection in some evangelical quarters for using the language of postmodernism for revisioning or reconceptualising theology seems less a radical revolution in evangelical thinking and more the appropriation of the latest academic idiom for playing the well-established traditional evangelical game of non-dogmatic, lowest-common denominator, mere Christianity.

This answers why I can find myself in agreement with some who use the term, while being puzzled by others. What do the groups have in common? Well, dissent - but grasping the degree and form of dissent helps understanding tremendously. Both reject the historical church for various reasons, but for some the historical church is an eccesiastical structure, some of whose teaching can be redeemed. For others, it's more like the whole things needs to be reinvented from top to bottom: structure, teachings, all based on present ideas about the past more than real history. It's rather pessimistic view, IMHO. Admissable evidence is defined too narrowly, and faith and reason are simplistically opposed. I haven't read Noll's book but I wonder if he had in mind the former group, while Trueman has the later. Myself, I share Noll's optimism about the first group and Trueman's pessimism about the later group. I also see the radical dissenters as inherently fractious and unlikely allies of anyone, even each other.

Dawkins vs. Scruton

2006-01-15T18:27:00.000-08:00

Roger Scruton, one of my favourite British writers / philosophers, takes on Richard Dawkins' theory that 'religion is a nasty meme':

I am not entirely persuaded by this extension by analogy of genetics. The theory that ideas have a disposition to propagate themselves by appropriating energy from the brains that harbour them recalls Molière's medical expert (Le Malade imaginaire) who explained the fact that opium induces sleep by referring to its virtus dormitiva (the ability to cause sleep). It only begins to look like an explanation when we read back into the alleged cause the distinguishing features of the effect, by imagining ideas as entities whose existence depends, as genes and species do, on reproduction. Nevertheless, let us grant Dawkins his stab at a theory. We should still remember that not every dependent organism destroys its host. In addition to parasites there are symbionts and mutualists — invaders that either do not impede or positively amplify their host's reproductive chances. And which is religion? Why has religion survived, if it has conferred no benefit on its adepts? And what happens to societies that have been vaccinated against the infection — Soviet society, for instance, or Nazi Germany — do they experience a gain in reproductive potential? Clearly, a lot more research is needed if we are to come down firmly on the side of mass vaccination rather than (my preferred option) lending support to the religion that seems most suited to temper our belligerent instincts, and which, in doing so, asks us to forgive those who trespass against us and humbly atone for our faults. So there are bad memes and good memes. Consider mathematics. This propagates itself through human brains because it is true; people entirely without maths — who cannot count, subtract or multiply — don't have children, for the simple reason that they make fatal mistakes before they get there. Maths is a real mutualist. Of course the same is not true of bad maths; but bad maths doesn't survive, precisely because it destroys the brains in which it takes up residence. Maybe religion is to this extent like maths: that its survival has something to do with its truth. Of course it is not the literal truth, nor the whole truth. Indeed, the truth of a religion lies less in what is revealed in its doctrines than in what is concealed in its mysteries. Religions do not reveal their meaning directly because they cannot do so; their meaning has to be earned by worship and prayer, and by a life of quiet obedience. Nevertheless truths that are hidden are still truths; and maybe we can be guided by them only if they are hidden, just as we are guided by the sun only if we do not look at it. The direct encounter with religious truth would be like Semele's encounter with Zeus, a sudden conflagration. ... Religions survive and flourish because they are a call to membership - they provide customs, beliefs and rituals that unite the generations in a shared way of life, and implant the seeds of mutual respect. Like every form of social life, they are inflamed at the edges, where they compete for territory with other faiths. To blame religion for the wars conducted in its name, however, is like blaming love for the Trojan war.

Bonus points for recognizing which of the three metaphysical philosophies Edward Fesser wrote about (yesterday's post) each of these writers represents. Tip: Neither of them is a universal realist. Scruton only sounds like it from time to time.

Universal trouble

2006-01-14T22:23:00.000-08:00

The real, the unreal, and the disillusioned Have a look at TCS Daily, where Edward Fesser examines the metaphysical roots of today's political philosophies. Here's the introduction:

Richard M. Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences, published in 1948, was among the founding documents of contemporary conservatism. The title phrase has become something of a cliché, and overuse has stripped it of the interesting meaning it once had. Nowadays most people assume that what Weaver was saying was that how we think is bound to affect how we act, and that the intellectual trends that prevail in a society will determine its moral and political character. To be sure, that was part of his meaning, but if that were all he had in mind his message would have been a pretty banal one, since no one denies that in this sense “ideas have consequences.” What is largely forgotten is that Weaver was making a play on words, and that his primary reference was to Plato’s famous Theory of Ideas, a metaphysical thesis that has cast a long shadow over the history of Western civilization. Indeed, Weaver’s view was that this metaphysical vision is what made Western civilization possible, that its abandonment was the primary source of the pathologies of the modern world so decried by conservatives, and that its recovery is essential if those pathologies are to be overcome. It hardly needs saying that not all conservatives today would express their creed in precisely these terms. Many religious conservatives, or at least those of an evangelical bent, would find them excessively high-falutin’. Many secular conservatives, fancying themselves too hard-headed and worldly-wise even for philosophy, let alone religion, would eschew Weaver’s formulation in favor of economics, or perhaps to take up the current fad for evolutionary psychology. Nevertheless, a consideration of metaphysical issues of the sort Weaver addressed would, I maintain, do much to clarify the nature of conservatism, and of the disputes that constantly break out among conservatives of different stripes. For there is no one as dogmatically beholden to a metaphysic as the man who denies that he has one... ... As the medieval world gave way to the modern one, and medieval to modern philosophy, nominalism won the day, and modern thinkers like Descartes and Locke abandoned the old conceptual apparatus of hylomorphism, with its appeal to forms and natural ends or purposes as fundamental to the understanding of things, and to the idea of the soul as the form of the living human body. “Mechanism” -- the view that physical things operate on purely mechanical principles, without natural ends or purposes and without instantiating anything like Plato’s or Aristotle’s Forms -- entailed a redefinition of the human body as nothing more than a complex machine, and “human nature” as nothing more than a specification of the principles by which the machine operates, like clockwork. Now if a living human body does not have a form -- any more than anything else does on the modern view -- then it does not have a soul either, at least as classically defined. Descartes thus re-defined the soul as a kind of non-physical object which is only contingently or accidentally attached to its body, rather than as a form which the body necessarily has to have in order to be a living body at all. One result of this is that the soul came to seem to modern Western thinkers an ever more elusive and mysterious entity, and therefore a dispensable one. Another is that it became harder to see what made a living human body the body of a person, since there is nothing about its being alive that entails (on the modern view anyway) that it has a soul. This problem was only exacerbated by Locke’s own re-definition of a person as a stream of connected conscious experiences, rather than a union of soul (form) and body (matter). Thus were sown the seeds -- inadvertently, to be sure -- that would eventually develop into the view that neither a fetus nor a Terri Schiavo counts as a person having a right to life. And in the other trends alluded to -- nominalism and mechanism -- we see the origins of the idea that “human nature” is either a purely human construct, or something that exists objectively only as a collection of behavioral tendencies, of no more inherent moral significance than the workings of a clock. We might, as a matter of prudence, want to keep them in mind as a possible barrier to the realization of our desires, but if we could find a way to alter them there would be no objective reason not to do so. Certainly these behavioral tendencies -- being ultimately nothing more than mechanical regularities -- do not, on the modern view, reflect anything like Aristotle’s natural ends or purposes or Plato’s Form of a human being, defining what is objectively good for us. And thus there is no absolute moral barrier to the radical revision of institutions that have traditionally been understood to reflect human nature -- hence socialism, the sexual revolution, and a thousand other things.

Seeds of division

2006-01-12T20:58:00.000-08:00

This article at Alvin Kimmel's Pontifications ties in nicely with the Peter Kreeft seminar my wife and I attended on the weekend, the one about Catholics and Evangelicals together. The text is by John L. Gresham, and the subject is historian Mark Noll's take on the Reformation today. Writes Gresham:

Noll characterizes the extent of this changed relationship quite well in his closing comments where he says Evangelicals and Catholics were like Elves and Orcs to one another, but now they are more like Ents and Hobbits, not quite speaking the same language or sharing the same culture but seeing themselves more on the same side. (I find it interesting that Noll pulls these analogies, without explanation or reference, from a mythical world created by a Catholic philologist, rightly confident that both his Evangelical and Catholic readers will get his point). The Middle Earth analogy is preceded by a Lindebeckian synopsis of historic Christian divisions as various cultural linguistic adaptations of Christian faith to new environmental challenges: Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Evangelical Protestantism, and Pentecostalism represent the four broad cultural linguistic expressions of Christian faith (each of which Noll affirms are rooted in a shared "mere Christianity")... Of course, to answer the question in the title of the book, Noll must move beyond historical description and consider the theological issues. He begins with the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which he describes, despite areas of doctrinal difference, in glowing terms. Evangelicals who read the Catechism "are in for a treat" he says. Noll makes note of the depth of scholarship, abundant scriptural and historical references, and the pastoral, prayerful and worshipful tone of the Catechism. (I only wish some dissenting Catholics could be so generous toward this great compendium of doctrine!) He describes vast areas in which evangelicals will find themselves in agreement with the Catechism, extending from its teaching on God, Trinity, Christ, Salvation and judgment to most of its devotional and moral teaching. In fact, he says Evangelical Protestants should find themselves in agreement with at least 2/3 of the content. (There is an important apologetic strategy suggested here: first to argue that the Church which is right on 2/3 of the issues, including such fundamental areas as Trinity and Christology just might be right on other issues as well; secondly, to show the interconnections between the 2/3 of doctrines Evangelicals already believe and the remaining 1/3 they still question.) What of the remaining 1/3 differences? First, as Noll points out again and again, many of the areas of difference are also areas of wide divergence among Evangelicals themselves. For, example, some Evangelicals will agree with much of the section on Baptism, others will find themselves in greater disagreement, depending upon their views on paedobaptism. Second, the most striking point made in this book is that justification is NOT one of those issues. Noll explicitly says if justification is the article on which the church stands or falls, the reformation is over! Based on the Catechism, the Joint Declaration and other ecumenical documents Noll finds the current Catholic teaching on justification closer to the teachings of the sixteenth century reformers than the beliefs of many Protestants, including many evangelicals. He notes the wide range of evangelical views from Luther and Calvin to Wesleyan Arminianism and places the Catholic view within that range. The Catholic view is closer to Luther and Calvin in its emphasis on divine grace Noll argues than are some extreme forms of Arminian Evangelicalism which overemphasize human agency. So, if justification no longer divides us, what does? Noll lists some of the usual topics: Mary, magisterium, sacraments, etc., but the heart of our division, he says, is ecclesial. On this he repeats a joke Evangelicals tell upon themselves in this regard, "The main difference between us (Evangelicals) and the Catholics is ecclesiology-they have one and we don't."

Th subject of ecclesiology is relatively new to me and I'm not prepared to say much about it. I am curious to know about the reaction of my non Catholic Christian readers to Noll's thesis. Noll is a respected Evangelical scholar, so how about it? Is it offensive or reasonable?

"Stephen Harper has a dog. You know who else had a dog? Hitler."

2006-01-12T18:22:00.000-08:00

The Liberals' attack ads have resulted in several very funny parodies. This Canoe story contains several of them. Like, I'm totally not making this up. Choose your Canada, people.

Notwithstanding fear

2006-01-11T19:11:00.000-08:00

The power of interpretation The donnybrook that Paul Martin wants to open up on changing the charter - and wasn't he supposed to be it's best defender, using it protect religious minorities? - seems like as good a place as any to discuss textual interpretation. Wait! This won't be boring, I promise. The way Martin and his defenders paint it, removing the notwithstanding clause removes a Damocles' sword from the rights that are in the Charter. The crude insinuation is that this will remove, once and for all, the ability of those nasty conservatives to bash minorities. This is based on the idea that a text, in this case the Charter, means exactly what it says it means and nothing else. No respectable scholar would argue that, and Martin knows it. The Charter, like any other law, has to be interpreted before it can be acted on. It's easy to overlook how important that is. You cannot safeguard the nation through a magical combination or words on a page. A sharp mind can do amazing things with any text. When the Liberals passed their SSM bill in the last session of the house, they did so in response to the Supreme Court, which had ruled that the existing definition of marriage was discriminatory under the Charter. The court didn't change a word of the Charter in reaching it's conclusion. The subject of gender orientation was 'read in'. The existing phraseology was kept, but it's meaning was altered. So you can see that altering the effect of the Charter does not require the use of the notwithstanding clause. That is a blunt weapon that most governments would rather not use, and why use it when you can get results with so much more finesse? In this case a court stacked with Liberal appointees (eight of ten) "found" a right. In a different case, the court could remove or impair a right in such a way that it still exists on paper but is of little consequence. In the Chaoulli case, for example, the Court ruled that overly long delays in accessing the services of the public health system were a violation of the Charter's guarantee of the right to personal security. It was a contentious decision but it was the right one, I think. To rule the other way would have been to impair the right to personal security tremendously. The point is that Chaoulli could have gone the other way, eroded a Charter right, and it would have done it without altering a dot of the Charter or using the notwithstanding clause. Martin's characterization of the notwithstanding clause as a threat to the Charter is baseless because the Charter is always subject to the interpretation of the court. No adult thinking person should be of the opinion that the court will always arrive at the "right" decision, held from excess by a mere document. These ten people are charged with a tremendous burden in a society undergoing as much rapid change as ours. Even with the best of intent, they could produce a Dredd Scott type of decision in some unkown future event. With no notwithstanding clause, the government will not be able to say, "thanks, but no, we will respectfully decline to accept that." It's hard to say what such a move of no confidence in the court would have on the court but it could be the less of two evils. In any case, any government that undertakes to use the notwithstanding clause would have to face the public at some point. It will be held accountable, which cannot be said of a court that botches a decision.

Martin's suggestion that he has to alter the Charter to save it is based on ignoring how much room there is to alter the document through interpretation. Now, I'm sure that Martin does in fact know this and is just praying on the fears of the ignorant voter. Unless his change is written into the Constitution it could simply be undone by a future government. Martin likely knows this also. During the whole SSM debate the ability of the Court to read the document with a wide degree of latitude was loudly trumpeted by those in favour and I argued that while it is helping you now, it might return to bite you in the ass in the future. The Martin Liberals are scared to death that future might be near at hand and are now claiming constructionism is the way to go. My originalist argument was that while the laws certainly need to be respectful of changes going on in the culture, the way to do this is through the process of revision and amendment in the house of commons. That is what we elect these people to do. The house is filled with three hundred and eight members elected from all across the country, who must respond to their local riding in order to keep their seats. The judges of the supreme court are, in contrast, ten people appointed (no real judicial review in Canada) by the PM. They answer to no one and were elected by no one. Martin's proposed course of action - increasing the autonomy of the court - is a step in the direction of a star chamber. The Liberal party has a preference for a loosey goosey manner of legal interpretation. It helps grease the wheels of government in their efforts to get the trains to run on time. This makes their claim to stand or fall on the text of the Charter somewhat ridiculous, and it means that voting Liberal means you can't be really sure about what you're getting. More specifically, in this case what they want to save is not so much the Charter, but their interpretation of it. No one who is not pure can be allowed near it, or Martin will turn red and wave his arms.

Martin and the Liberals are over the line and think that their vision of the country is the only "true" one. Non Liberal Francophones and westerners can't allowed to touch the levers of power because we would only dilute the glorious truth of their stealth revolution. As a democrat and a Trinitarian, I think there is a lot to recommend interaction of differing parties. Here's a quote that gets at the same idea. As J.S. Mill wrote (surprised?):

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. ... Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of; else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty.

The deliberations of the Court would be enriched with the addition of new points of view that fall in the wide range of Canadian tradition. The Martin government is doing its utmost to permanently exclude them and in so doing, it would alter the nature of the Charter and the court that gives it life. This fear ridden attempt, done as a campaign afterthought, is the height of irresponsibility. Just go, Mr. Martin. Please, just GO.

Postmodern outreach

2006-01-10T19:16:00.000-08:00

I get mistaken for a rad trad Catholic at times, and even - this is really funny to me - as a fundamentalist. Sorry, no can do sir, as the following will attest.

Rebecca and I went to see Boston College philosophy professor Peter Kreeft speak on Sunday night. I like Kreeft, but with reservations. He is a convert (from Presbyterianism, I think) and he is at times too literal in his reading of the Bible for my liking. And all of this stuff about demons and whatnot leaves me with a shrug. Professor Kreeft also really dislikes postmodernism. As for the examples he raises - Sartre, Nietzsche - I have not much use for them either. It's a mistake, however, to think that they are all that there is to postmodernism. Pope Benedict has said that he feels postmodernism is a more fertile ground for the faith than modernism, and it's not too hard to see why. Postmodernism is a leveling of the intellectual field, a recognition that science - for all it's wonders - can't account for itself. Modernism regards theses which can neither be proved nor disproved as non entities, or - at best - as private matter. What the Pope was getting at, I think, is that some forms of postmodernism (the less extreme kind) allow something like an free market of ideas in which he feels the Church can speak and be heard. I think what Benedict is getting at is echoed by another convert here:

Either Christianity is true and can handle every sort of criticism, attack, and harsh light cast upon it - or it is weak and flawed and not worth my time.

Postmodernism can help to lay the first plank that educated people need today, by providing an effective critique of scientism, such that the simple but stark and ubiquitous nature of faith (and Faith) can be more clearly seen, and seen to be something of value. It doesn't matter that Nietzsche was a critic of Christianity, as this interesting essay points out:

Nietzsche is especially instructive here, because he cannot be accused of any revanchist Christian bias in his diatribes against liberal democracies. His most prominent English biographer, R. J. Holingdale, makes a striking point when he observes: "Nineteenth-century rationalism was characterized by insight into the difficulty in accepting revealed religion, and obtuseness regarding the consequences of rejecting it." Above all, I would argue, Nietzsche warned against that peculiar obtuseness of secularized Europe that had managed to persuade itself that ethical striving alone could bring about an eschatological kingdom on earth. That to me is Nietzsche's great lesson for Christians.

Kreeft was attempting to reach out to mixed Catholic and Evangelical audience, and that's a good thing. In doing so, however, I felt he was misrepresenting at least a little, and what he was misrepresenting was a bit of my own past. Those explorations lead me here, and they can do so for others as well.

I got this in the mail the today (I've shortened it a lot):

Then how is it possible that two - or three - or five Vicars of Christ - Vicars of Christ, in Heaven's name! - can have been such bad Shepherds of the Universal Church? "It cannot be", cry out the 'sedevacantists', "they cannot have been true Popes." Let us note firstly that this often indignant reaction proceeds from the Faith. If someone did not believe in the Church, in the Papacy in particular, obviously he would have no difficulty in granting that Popes could be grave-diggers of the Church. But let us also note that it is exactly the same argument that pushes liberal Catholics to be liberal, and 'sedevacantist' Catholics to become 'sedevacantist': (Major premise) The Pope is infallible. (Minor premise) The recent Popes are liberals. :: (Liberal conclusion) Therefore we must become liberal. ('Sedevacantist' conclusion) Therefore these "popes" are not true Popes. ... A Catholic being tempted by 'sedevacantism' cannot think too hard on this apparently surprising relationship between 'sedevacantism' and liberalism - they may be like heads and tails of the same coin. Now in the argument condensed above, the logic is good, the Minor is good, so the problem must be in the Major. It lies in fact in the exaggeration of papal infallibility. And here we come to my double reason: - to make the Truth and the Church of God so dependent on human beings is a too human way of considering the things of God.

The writer is a Bishop unknown to me but I sympathize with what he's saying, although I do not think Faith is at the root of it. The rad trads are doubters and what they seem to doubt is Providence, ie. they prefer their ideas about Providence to what Providence has provided.

"We did not make this up."

2006-01-10T16:15:00.000-08:00

I came home from work today and saw this ad being discussed on a CTV news program. Wow, it's not as colossally dumb as the Charter amendment proposal written on a Tim's napkin, but it's close.

"This is insanity"

2006-01-09T20:46:00.000-08:00

From The Globe and Mail's "live blog" of the debate:

Brian Milner, 8:20 p.m.Finally something substantive. Mary Janigan, 8:20 p.m. Oh no. Oh no. This is insanity. He would get rid of the clause that made the whole constitutional deal possible. The notwithstanding clause was the key. Brian Milner, 8:20 p.m. Here we go. Notwithstanding. Marcus Gee, 8:21 p.m. Hang on: Is Martin saying he'd try to scrap the notwithstanding clause? That's news. Marcus Gee, 8:21 p.m. What a weird time to raise it, out of the blue during a debate. It's a Hail Mary pass. Brian Milner, 8:23 p.m. Alas, back to scandal. Marcus Gee, 8:24 p.m. Excellent off the cuff reply from Harper on the constitution. If it ain't borke, why fix it? Mary Janigan, 8:24 p.m. And harper wants to put back property rights. Which was another part of the deal made in late fall of 1981. We could spend the next five years talking constitution while the world passes us by. Marcus Gee, 8:25 p.m.Just what we need: Another constitutional debate! Canadians would rather eat glass.

There you have it. PM Martin is insane, and playing with fire on many files here...

Leader's debate

2006-01-09T20:23:00.000-08:00

I thought the funniest part of the debate tonight was PM Paul Martin saying something like "being aboriginal causes poverty." Ok, so he mis-spoke, it was still funny coming from a guy as self righteous as Paul Martin. Martin was self righteous enough to tell BQ leader Gilles Duceppe that Quebec is not a nation but a people, "just like the Acadians." Yeah boy, that'll do wonders on the national unity file! Come to think of it, so will suggesting that we remove parliament's right to use the notwithstanding clause. Naw, that doesn't sound like an ill conceived idea hatched in desperation, the product of short term thinking. Naw, not at all. We'll spin it like this, see? We'll sell it like we're giving the people power by doing that. They'll never figure out that it actually involves ditching the sovereignty of the parliament in an effort to cling to power now. Sell the sizzle, not the steak, which happens to be swapping democracy for oligarchy, ie. create a wing of the Federal government (the supreme court) that is accountable to neither the house or the Senate, or to the people. They'll love it! Get me Bono! Tory leader Stephen Harper put in what I thought was, in all honesty, his best performance to date. He was conciliatory and statesman like. If Harper flubbed, I missed it. The closest he came was the missed opportunity that arose when Martin told him "the Americans are our neighbors and not our country." That should have seen a rejoinder on Martin's America bashing, which is unworthy of a national leader. Tackle the file, yes, but don't let it get personal - as Martin can't seem to help doing. Gilles Duceppe was also very good - informed and even witty. Socialist Jack Layton sounded scripted, and like an also ran. That's a shame because despite some very sharp differences that I have with his party and his vision of Canada, I would prefer to see the NDP get elected in a seat that the Tories can't win. Why? I've been saying for a long time now, to anyone who will listen to me, that we need to kick the Liberal Party in the ass, and I mean hard. Discredit the Matinites and send the party to the backwoods to get its' head on straight. If Jack could get away from the script that says his party is the only one that cares about social issues, he might be able to raise his credibility enough to get over 18% or whatever the NDP highwater mark is. A more statesman and reasonable claim would be that "we do it better." But that would alienate the base, so I guess Jack's screwed then.

Science, religion and ER

2006-01-08T10:49:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post is carrying a good piece on science and religion this morning:

the case for this "warfare thesis," as historians call it, was discredited decades ago. It had already largely crumbled when I was reading my childhood science books. "I do not know one historian who believes that there is a history of warfare between science and Christianity," says William Ashworth, historian of science at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. The thesis was popularized in the 19th century by writers such as the first president of Cornell University, Andrew Dickson White, whose 1896 History of the Warfare of Science With Theology in Christendom is still in print and still accepted as gospel in some quarters. But many of the clashes reported by White have turned out to be fiction. Those that did occur, such as the Galileo affair, were as much (if not more) about personalities and politics as they were about beliefs. "Most people learn about Galileo, and his problem with the Church, and don't learn about many other scientists," says Ashworth, "and so they assume that this is a typical case, and there have been lots of Galileo affairs. The truth is, there haven't." Attempts to salvage the warfare thesis by narrowing it to authoritarian Catholics (vs. dissident Protestants) or, alternatively, Protestant biblical literalism (vs. the more allegorical Catholic tradition) have also fallen apart under scholarly scrutiny. Similarly, religious alarmists are crying wolf when they blame science (usually in the form of "Darwinism") for the increasing secularization of society over the past century. Historians and sociologists have found that divisions within the Church have been typically more important than any conflict with science in estranging people from orthodoxy. As a case in point, Darwin's loss of faith was an emotional reaction to the cruelty of Church doctrine (especially regarding damnation), not an intellectual conclusion drawn from his scientific studies. For most of history, the border between science and religion was fuzzy, to say the least. Scientist and priest were often the same person. Few outside the Church had the education or the inclination to pursue research. Those not in the clergy, such as Galileo and Newton, were nonetheless devoutly religious. Even in our current secular age, some 40 percent of scientists say they believe in a God who answers prayers, according to a poll published in the journal Nature. This is significantly lower than the public at large, but it hardly qualifies as an army of atheists. And despite its reputation for astronomer-bashing in the age of Galileo, the Catholic Church was for centuries by far the biggest source of funding for scientific research and education. This is not to say that there haven't been power struggles. There have been plenty. It's just that the combatants - even in the iconic ones surrounding the likes of Copernicus and Darwin - typically don't sort neatly into science and religious camps. ... What about that most contentious of issues - Genesis? Biblical scholars such as the 17th-century Anglican archbishop James Ussher had deduced from Scripture that the world was about 6,000 years old. Some observers at the time were indeed nervous that the earth's layers might reveal a much longer history. Young Earth creationists today refuse to countenance any deviation from Ussher's figure. But for mainstream 17th-century Christians, it was a non-issue. Allegorical interpretations of Genesis had been relatively uncontroversial at least since the time of Saint Augustine. What was controversial was not the numerical date of creation, but whether there had been creation at all - or if the earth and its inhabitants were eternal, as some radical philosophers asserted. For orthodox Christians, the eternalist heresy was scary indeed: No creation, no Creator; no Creator, no religion.

We are seekers after the truth, mixing and matching methods in an effort to advance in knowledge. The National Catholic Reporter writes of the Pope that:

The emerging heart of Benedict's papacy is about truth - his belief that modern men and women must find their way back to objective truths about human life, imprinted in nature by the Creator. Even if the fallen human mind needs the "purification" of faith to perceive this truth, Benedict believes that it nonetheless responds to something deep in the human heart.

How else to explain this? I read once that one of the important but less discussed differences in our scholarly squabbles is the motive to study. Do we seek knowledge in order to increase our power over matter or to grow our souls?

Did anyone else happen to catch ER this week? Amy Wellborn has a synopsis here, as well as a lengthy comment thread. It is a well done program but the Catholic side is not well represented by Dr. Luka Kovac. This guy is the "faithful" one yet he has relations with another doctor and does not mention marriage or speak up about his reluctance to see the unplanned baby aborted. Thankfully his other is able to choose well - even without his support. More controversially (!), he advises a teen pregnant by rape that he can administer something that will allow God to "reconsider." Now he may be obliged to discuss all options, despite her family's support for her baby, given the nature of his workplace (why work in such a hellhole?). Kovacs' little theological discussion with her was thoroughly silly. 1) One of the texts he quotes is Genesis, where God "breathes" life into Adam after his body was made. Why is this silly? This is a literal reading by a man who cannot be said to be in any way a Biblical literalist. Can you see the irony of this intelligent, sophisticated man turning into a Bible thumper in order to teach this doe eyed girl that God's "infallible" Word shows that the child is not yet human life? How does one reconcile this with doing this procedure in order to "allow" God to fix his "mistake"? Tip to Dr. Kovacs: God is THE criterion of truth, so that if you are judging him your conception of God is not big enough. 2) The second objection is that Adam, if we must be literal about it, is a form of special creation, not biological creation after the fall. The cases are not similar. 3) He also suggests to her that neither he or she is culpable in the event that the treatment does result in a miscarriage. By this logic the people who fired into the boxing day crowds and killed a teenage girl in Toronto are also not culpable, which is nonsense. We are culpable for things that can reasonably be expected to result from our actions. 4) Let's say that the "treatment" fails. Now our young mother is faced with either trying again, using more "direct" methods, or carrying child she knows she tried to kill. She might even find herself trying to raise it. How will the health of the baby be affected by surviving this effort to destroy it? 5) Kovacs also counsels her to deceive her parents on what she has chosen to do, telling her that they don't need to know the miscarriage was not natural. Does this not contradict 3 above?

The weird monkey

2006-01-06T18:00:00.000-08:00

I've been tagged by this meme three times in two days, so I suppose I really must do something about it. You know who you are. Five weird things about me:

I'm reasonably proficient with technology and like playing about with computers but I hate phones. I really, really hate cell phones. Why? Another wit said it well: "It rings, you jump." I don't jump for nobody. Leastways not if I can help it.
I have a crazy hair on my eyebrow that grows to simply stupid lengths if I don't cut it.
I dislike heights and therefore have no plans to fly. This is not open to discussion.
When I was a kid my Dad used to listen to country music, and I liked this little eccentricity in him. When I was a teen I began to scorn the genre. This lasted until about two years ago (mid thirties now) and I now play it all the time when I'm driving. The old stuff makes me really nostalgic and I just like the new stuff.
I look really odd when I walk the dogs. It's not me per se, but the fact that one dog is of decent size and the other is tiny. I have a german pointer and a mini daschund. They get on splendidly.

The friendly atheist

2006-01-05T16:27:00.000-08:00

Look up. Look waaay up... There's an interesting post at Anal Philosopher:

Many people are devoutly religious, and I respect them. I’m what William Rowe calls a “friendly” atheist. Qua atheist, I believe that there is no God (and that I’m justified in so believing); but qua friendly atheist, I believe that a person can be justified in believing in God. If you (the reader) believe that God exists and I believe that God does not exist, then one of us is right and the other wrong, since the propositions are contradictory. But even though we can’t both be right, we can both be justified in our beliefs. Truth is not justification. One can have a justified false belief just as one can have an unjustified true belief. How can both theism and atheism be justified? Easy. The world as we experience it is compatible both with God and without God. As philosophers of science would put it, belief is underdetermined by data (or experience). There are, of course, unfriendly atheists, just as there are unfriendly theists. I may even have been unfriendly earlier in my life, but now I’m not. Which brings me to my subject: Why are leftists hostile to religion? The hostility takes different forms, from denying that theism can be justified (epistemic hostility) to trying to drive religion out of public life (legal or social hostility) to discriminating against theists in one’s personal or professional life (personal hostility). The debate over Design Theory is just one manifestation of hostility. I cannot for the life of me see the harm in teaching high-school students that some scientists and philosophers of science believe that the best explanation of natural phenomena makes reference to a designer. The opposition to such a harmless proposal is so vociferous that it requires an extraordinary hypothesis to explain it. Something more than truth is at stake. Leftist dogma is at stake. Let me take a stab at explaining the hostility. The following remarks, like much else in this blog, are meant to be tentative. Leftists are hostile to religion because leftism competes with religion for the same cognitive and affective space...

This is my own view of the atheist-theist debate as well. Both theories have a certain coherence but I think that atheism is not compatible with truth and freedom, as I understand them. Neither is leftism.

A tea party

2006-01-04T20:37:00.000-08:00

Mark Steyn's latest is deserves the praise it's getting, so do go on and have a look. It's a bit long and there's a lot that could be said about it, but I'm just going to hone in on this little laugh-till-the-coffee-comes-up-your-nose bit:

This [demographic threats to women] ought to be the left's issue. I'm a conservative--I'm not entirely on board with the Islamist program when it comes to beheading sodomites and so on, but I agree Britney Spears dresses like a slut: I'm with Mullah Omar on that one. Why then, if your big thing is feminism or abortion or gay marriage, are you so certain that the cult of tolerance will prevail once the biggest demographic in your society is cheerfully intolerant? Who, after all, are going to be the first victims of the West's collapsed birthrates? Even if one were to take the optimistic view that Europe will be able to resist the creeping imposition of Sharia currently engulfing Nigeria, it remains the case that the Muslim world is not notable for setting much store by "a woman's right to choose," in any sense. I watched that big abortion rally in Washington in 2004, where Ashley Judd and Gloria Steinem were cheered by women waving "Keep your Bush off my bush" placards, and I thought it was the equivalent of a White Russian tea party in 1917. By prioritizing a "woman's right to choose," Western women are delivering their societies into the hands of fellows far more patriarchal than a 1950s sitcom dad. If any of those women marching for their "reproductive rights" still have babies, they might like to ponder demographic realities: A little girl born today will be unlikely, at the age of 40, to be free to prance around demonstrations in Eurabian Paris or Amsterdam chanting "Hands off my bush!" Just before the 2004 election, that eminent political analyst Cameron Diaz appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show to explain what was at stake: "Women have so much to lose. I mean, we could lose the right to our bodies. . . . If you think that rape should be legal, then don't vote. But if you think that you have a right to your body," she advised Oprah's viewers, "then you should vote." Poor Cameron. A couple of weeks later, the scary people won. She lost all rights to her body.

This is a humourous way to deal with the dark subject Steyn has raised. None of it is news to me. The fly in the ointment, if there is one, is that it presumes that present trends continue. That isn't always a safe assumption. It's too late for the boomers to do anything much about this problem first hand (as it were) but they might have a indirect influence through consultation, law, etc. I think that's not bloody likely, however. That leaves generation X, of which I am at the very tail end. Sadly, I don't think my peers even know there is a problem (most of them). So that leaves generation Y. These kids are still being formed, some as lefty as their boomer parents, others leaning south park conservative. It's unlikley that they'll hold those views well into adulthood, when life begins to pare away at opinions in a darwinain way. If those conservative kids mature in their conservativism early enough, it's possible - perhaps - that we might see the beginings of a change. When the failings of earlier generations begin to be more obvious, the ways of those earlier generations will begin to become discredited and they may root around in various older traditions in a search for a way forward. That's been my story, to some degree. So Bob's yer uncle then. Remember all those folks saying Canadian PM Paul Martin was going to walk away with the house of commons? He's turned out to be a minority leader in danger of losing even that (and it couldn't happen to a nicer guy). Motto: don't count your chicks before they hatch.

'Never seen vinyl'

2006-01-04T18:09:00.000-08:00

Wired magazine interviews Pete Tong:

WN: What do you think of Apple's adventures in music? Tong: Apple's music stuff is so simple to use, just like the Mac. iPods have changed everyone's life. It doesn't matter whether you are 7 or 70, everyone wants one. But iTunes libraries are growing so large people are outgrowing hard drive space, and using drag-and-drop to put libraries elsewhere is so archaic. I want a button to make my PowerBook speak to my main iTunes library and consolidate the collection. I get sent tracks all the time on my notebook when I'm on the move. It's kind of scary that you can have your entire collection on one or two hard drives. My 25 years of vinyl are in storage. I played a 7-inch vinyl set recently and discovered there are 18-year-olds who have never seen vinyl. ... There is genuine concern about how to stop music being passed around for free. Once you take the money out of music, it's not fair; people (artists, producers, managers and more) can't get paid.

That bit about vinyl creeps me out; when I was a little kid I had a mickey mouse record player. The needle was held by his arm (you know the one I'm talking about). I don't miss LPs, with all their hissing, popping, skipping and breaking, however. I always thought Neil Young was crazy for claiming the sound was better. I'm also quite happy about not having to buy whole albums anymore, which brings me to Tong's comment about the need to get paid. Basically, I don't buy it. The argument is that if people don't get paid, they won't record anything. I don't think that's true. Making music is a deeply human thing to do - just like all of the arts are. And the technology for recording is getting cheaper all of the time. So, no, I think people will continue to make and record music. For fun and for fame, and, baring that, for notoriety. This has already happened with text. I like to write, so here you are - free stuff to read. You will remember me, right? And tell all your friends? I'm not worried about quality falling either because you won't tell your friends about stuff that isn't worth bothering about. At least musicians will always be able to charge fees for live concerts. We scribes are not so fortunate.

The blogging ethic

2006-01-03T20:03:00.000-08:00

Bloggers with great aspirations (or even aspirations of greatness) might want to check this list of ten ways to better your blog by Evan Schaeffer. These are all good, sensible ideas. My own two bits: no one ever tells you that the editorial decisions are much harder than the writing. If you didn't want to write, you wouldn't blog. The question of what to post and when comes with it and we learn as we go - learning from our own mistakes and others' successes. As much as I enjoy Althouse's frequent posting and wide range of topics I know that I simply don't have the time to do that. Even if I had a laptop there's no way I could post from work. I also admire bloggers who can challenge our comfortable assumptions and make connections that are both intriguing and sensible, not sensationalistic. Check out Liberty Corner, who tips us off to an interesting book review in the NYT and goes on to offer as much to chew on as the review - if not more. The book in question is The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success by Rodnet Stark. The Times reviewer challenges Stark's thesis by asking:

What about France and Spain? As Roman Catholic realms, they fell outside [Max] Weber's paradigm, but not Mr. Stark's. Mr. Stark argues that Christianity is necessary but not sufficient for the development of capitalism, which requires political freedom to thrive. Once the capitalist city-states of Italy lost their freedom, they became economic backwaters. Fine, but if the spirit of free inquiry and human equality is inherent in Christianity, why did Spain and France become despotisms in the first place? And, while we're at it, why is it that so many non-Christians - Chinese, Jews and Indians, for example - have taken to business and technology so brilliantly?

The answer is not so difficult, I think. Firstly, there is only one truth and the Chinese, Jews and Indians, being rational and intelligent people have indeed found good bits of it, as did past civilizations like Greece. Under no circumstances can the west today (or yesterday) be understood to have a monopoly on the truth. Secondly, being Christian or even being Catholic is not to be one monolithic thing. We tend to think of Catholicism as synonymous with the great structure built by Gregory the VII. The reality, however, is that the church has had different sorts of relationships with the societies it has found itself in and it will continue to do so. Not all of these political structures will be as respectful of the truth as others - and any claims to be respectful have to be evaluated in light of actual practise and not simply proclamation.

The White Witch

2006-01-02T13:06:00.000-08:00

Tilda Swinston, who plays the White Witch in the movie adaptaton of CS Lewis' Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe:

"I wanted to shake up a kind of idea of what I see as a rather dishonorable Hollywood tradition of giving us villains who look dark, and I thought this was the one to do it with 'cause, apart from everything else, she is the White Witch. I also thought it would be particularly irresponsible at this moment for an American, globally released picture to have a villain who looked either like a Jew or an Arab."

Tip: Stuart Buck What can I say about this popcorn-brained comment without being really mean? OMG, ROTFL will have to suffice.

New faces

2006-01-02T12:42:00.000-08:00

One of the nice things about blogging is meeting new people, some of whom applaud you and some who challenge you. It's been a while since I tipped my hat to new bloggers (or bloggers who are new to me), so here goes:

Upper Canada Catholic: Carlton's blog has been around a while now and continues to shine.
Allan's Analysis: Del has just started blogging so drop by and say hello. I think he's off to a great start.
G as in good, H as in Happy: A smart blog by a lawyer out of Texas.
Seedlings: The blog of teacher and new dad Micheal Hobson.

Lighting a candle, burning down the house

2006-01-02T11:30:00.000-08:00

This is post two in my Reformation series. Part one is here. After pointing out that "much of the anticlerical rhetoric which became an integral part of the Reformation was actually the product of long standing disputes among the clergy, rather than spontaneous lay criticism", Diarmaid MacCulloch has a very nice description of what that old order was like for the day to day life of people in Europe:

The structure created by Gregory VII's first reformation was a marvelous way of containing the teeming variety of Western Christendom's religious needs. A devout Christian hungering to reach out and touch the world beyond death could do so in a rich variety of different settings: in the savage austerity of the monasteries of contemplative hermits, the Carthusians; in the deliberately and exuberantly extravagant liturgy of most ceremonial version of the Benedictine Rule, the Cluniacs; in the dramatic preaching of friars or the clerical stars of the secular pulpit chaplaincies; in lighting a single candle at a lonely wayside statue of God's Mother; in craning forward in a crowded parish church to see the elevation of the consecrated bread and wine in the Mass at some cheerfully decorated side altar. The people most withdrawn from the concerns of the world might be equally esteemed in by those right in its center: so in fifteenth century England, Carthusian hermit-monks dominated the production and distribution of devotional literature, eagerly and perhaps wistfully read by kings and noblemen amid the squalid and often brutal jostles for power which passed for government in England a the time. The Church was everywhere in society. The three most complicated machines which most people would ever see in this world were the pipe organ, the clock and the windmill: the first two were exclusively to be found in churches. What better proof that the Church was in command of humankind's most adventurous and innovative thinking? What better organization than the church to give western Europe a sense of it's common identity?

Of course, in addition to the in-fighting among the various groups of religious there were real problems arising from the mixing of religion and politics - as the next passage shows:

Yet the two Popes between them occupied St. Peter's throne for two decades (and who deeply detested each other) had a very selective understanding of what might glorify the papacy. Alexander VI, from the Valencian noble family of Borja (Borgia), shielded his vulnerability as an outsider against his many Italian enemies by ruthlessly exploiting the Church's most profitable offices to promote his Borga relatives, including his own children children by several of his mistresses - a scandalous flouting of clerical celibacy imposed by the twelfth century Reformation, even if the Pope's two most notorious children Lucrezia and Cesare had not provided extreme examples of aristocratic self indulgence. Julius II relished being his own general when he plunged into the Italian wars which proliferated after the French invasion, and he was especially proud when in 1506 he recaptured Bologna, second city of the Vatican states after Rome and lost to the papacy seventy years before. The contemporary Italian historian Fransesco Guicciardini commented with delicate sarcasm that Julius was 'certainly worthy of great glory, if he had been a secular prince.' The Popes ludicrously obvious failings in their pretensions as leaders of the universal church made a mockery of their defeat of the conciliarists, and did nothing to end continuing criticism of papal primacy. That made the papal machine all the more sensitive to any new challenge to its authority, or to any attempt to resurrect language and idea which had been used against it before, as Luther discovered in the years after 1517.

This high level failure to play by the rules and trust in Providence - which is seen Reformers like Luther and Zwlingi as well - did not go unnoticed by others with an axe to grind. Skipping ahead from Chapter One to Chapter Four, we come to this:

Martin Luther and magesterial reformers of the 1520's like Bucer himself had been radical in their own strictly limited way. They posed a radical challenge to the authority claimed by the western Church's hierarchy, but they did so in order to claim for themselves the first five centuries of Christianity: indeed the essence of their cause was that the official Church had unjustifiably added doctrine to this hard fought original package. The old Church denied that its medieval additions were anything more than developments of the truths which the early Church had discovered; hence B.B. Warfelid's insight that the sixteenth-century Reformation was a struggle within the mind of Augustine. What happened now, however, was that a great variety of challenges arose beyond the contested area of authority, taking up matters on which Luther, Zwingi and the Pope agreed. More radical spirits denied that the outcome of the early Church's history was the right one, the outcome that God wanted.

I have very serious trouble finding sympathy for this last claim, a great deal more trouble than I do in finding sympathy for Luther and Zwingli. Who are we to say that history's unfolding has been a failure? What would a 'correct' history look like and how what would it take to get there? How many 'year zero' 's would it take? Why would God 'hide' his church until now? And it's always hidden "until now" it seems. The untethering of religion from history has been, in my mind, a disaster. Here is where the hobgoblin of ideology first breaks loose. Another sad result - sadder than any of the papal scandals I've linked to above - is that this is a poisoning of the well of Christian teaching. As awful as Borgia was, for example, he is one man and his abuses do not alter the essence of the institution or the culture in which they took place. This ahistorical approach, on the other hand, is in jeaodardy of loosing touch with the signifigance of incarnation, God's beachead in history, and thereby risks turning Christianity into just another ideology.

The Brokeback condition

2006-01-01T22:17:00.000-08:00

"If you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction" If you haven't yet read Rod Dreher's review of Brokeback Mountain yet, well, there aren't going too many better places to begin to think about Ang Lee's latest. Dreher leans on Flannery O'Connor a lot and this undoubtedly lifts his perspective above the fray. Get Religion says this very orthodox, traditional Christian's

nuanced evaluation of this movie and the whirlpool around it is getting him some interesting mail over at the Dallas Morning News opinion-page weblog. This is one of those situations that journalists tend to cherish. Rod is managing to tick off people on both sides of the love-hate spectrum on this movie.

So what did he write?

It is impossible to watch this movie and think that all would be well with Jack and Ennis if only we'd legalize gay marriage. It is also impossible to watch this movie and not grieve for them in their suffering, even while raging over the suffering that these poor country kids who grew up unloved cause for their families. As the film grapples with Ennis' pain, confusion and cruelty, different levels of meaning unspool - social, moral, spiritual and erotic. In the end, Brokeback Mountain is not about the need to normalize homosexuality, or "about" anything other than the tragic human condition. [Flannery] O'Connor once wrote that you don't have to have an educated mind to understand good fiction, but you do have to have "at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery." The mystery of the human personality can never be fully plumbed, only explored. To the frustration of ideologues, artists like Annie Proulx and Ang Lee undertake a journey to those depths and return to tell the truth about what they've seen - which is not necessarily what any of us wants to hear. As Ms. O'Connor taught, "Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction."

If Annie Proulx [author of the story] and Ang Lee have succeeded in this way, then my hat's off to them. See also here.

Sunday obligation

2006-01-01T12:05:00.000-08:00

My friend Ilona is asking interesting questions in the light of some "churches" being closed last Sunday due to Christmas. She gets at the nub of it here:

But if I strip off the descriptive phrases of Sabbath or Christmas, etc.... I am left with this: Do Christians have moral obligations? That helped me to think a bit. I already have the premise that we are not under the law, and that we have no obligatory rules.... but what about this idea of moral obligation. We all, as Christians, recognize that we do have moral obligations, that it is wrong to do or not do some things. For instance take the word Sabbath, since we are using this.... is it wrong to not take certain time for God, IOW, do we have a moral obligation to take time for God, and what parameters does that entail. Giving... we would all recognize that the Christian is morally obligated to be giving. Not in a specific time or way, perhaps, but something is morally wrong with the picture of the Christian who is not giving... and then my question is "why?" There have to be universal principles of some sort which are incumbent upon even the Christian.... or maybe even especially upon the Christian, in light of all God has done and what we know of that. But truthfully... the best explanation I can come up with is the idea of "the rule of love" and the pragmatic working out of Faith. That is, having faith that works by love will equate certain behaviors... and those are from what the Law of Moses and the Prophets have informed our thinking. It is as if we cannot escape those things as foundational to our understanding, even if our obedience takes other forms than the Law spelled out.

I like everything she's done here. We are no longer taught the Law as slaves, (ie. Divine command) but are asked to keep it as adults. I was also thinking about Ilona's question during the second reading at Mass this morning:

But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.

The word "were" is unclear here. It might mean the law is no more after Christ rose, or it might refer to each person's birth, which is also a past tense event. Ie. it might be rhetorically asking asking "who is NOT born under the Law?" I lean towards the second interpretation, so when Ilona said, "I already have the premise that we are not under the law, and that we have no obligatory rules" I was a little worried about where she was going. I think it's disgraceful for a church that calls itself Christian to shutter it's doors on a Sunday, and to use the excuse that "it's Christmas" is incomprehensible. I mean, what are they doing, closing their doors so that people can get last minute bargains at Wal Mart? I know - the idea is that we're free to worship in whatever way we see fit. It is my experience, however, that to be fully human is to live in a community. More specifically, it is to live in a faith and family community. When we are separated from family and community experience shows that we are not more strong and free, but weak and isolated. That's why people freed in this way often wind up at Wal Mart or something equally inappropriate. We wind up simply dragged along by the crowd, rather than standing apart from it. And a Christian really needs to stand out from the crowd. If we blend in too easily, we're doing something wrong. I agree that the Law is stamped on our Nature (our essence) and that to go against it is an act of self erasure. In doing so I have to be clear that I don't mean by "law" all of the Abramaic laws. I mean only the ten commandments, including the one about the Sabbath. I also don't intend the commandments to be verbatim the laws of the land, but they do apply to Christians. Learning every detail, nuance and applicability of this law is a life's project, a project of love and liberty. A contradiction can't be free because it can't even be said to exist.

Happy new year!

2006-01-01T10:45:00.000-08:00

Happy new year everyone. I liked this blessing from Mass this morning and I offer it here for all of my readers (and non readers too):

The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, "Speak to Aaron and his sons, saying, Thus you shall bless the people of Israel: you shall say to them, The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace."

I don't usually make a habit of doing New Year's resolutions but I do want to make an effort to be more regular in my postings here. I want to make an effort to do one post a day unless I'm otherwise committed to something for the time in question, or have advised readers that I'm taking a week off to recharge my batteries. Twice in the past month I've let this place go for four or five days with no explanation, and I don't want to get into the habit of doing that. That said, I am helping out at our parish's RCIA (Rite of Catholic Initiation of Adults) classes this spring and that means I will be occupied on Thursday nights. It's likely there will be a lot of skipped Thursdays until a few weeks after Easter.

The Death of Journalism

2005-12-28T18:08:00.000-08:00

"Users are seeing the work of traditional news media as system damage and routing around it." Back in high school I thought being a journalist would be really neat. After a couple of semesters in University "Communications" courses I began to think corporate communications was a dirty business I wanted not too much to do with. After a year or so in the field I knew I had been right. Today, I think I'd rather pick up road kill than be road kill. Examples:

Relapsed Catholic on Kwanzaa
The Curt Jester exposes sensationalism in Quebec
My wife points me to a bit of drivel on blogs at the National Post today. I just cancelled my subscription over the holidays because the thing was so darn warmed over, tepid and blah. More of the same here folks, nothing to see.

Vanderleun at the American Digest gets it, but over simplifies. What new tech has done is drive the price of producing copy way down, which is why there is so much of it, and why so much of it is really bad. The price barrier has been lowered, and old school editors still hold their audience in contempt, seeking to reach a mass audience by dumbing down their wares under the mantra of "give the people what they want." Nobody who has to carefully manage their time will put up with this any longer. The cream of the audience has been given new options by the same tech that makes producing text so cheap. This audience - one much sought by advertisers - has the smarts and the tools to go on line as Vanderleun mentions. What Vanderleun misses is that not everyone relishes the control freaky tab jock thing. What the old media needs is a new crop of editors. Editors that get the technology their readers use, and keep on getting it. Getting it is not at all the same thing as merely using it. Getting it means knowing that while the mass audience will always be there, it is shrinking relative to what it has historically been. The niche is the part of the market that is growing. It is also demanding and critical and can sniff out a poseur at ten paces. To serve a niche you have to walk the walk. Want to write about blogging? 30 minutes surfing and 30 minutes writing equals trash that no one who is in that niche needs to read. Being an editor is tough. You need to pick hot stories, see to it they get done well, and then fact check the ever loving %$#@ out of them. Be fearless. Your audience wants to be informed, to stay on top of it. Squashing the Kwanzaa column or wasting column space on a non story like the Globe did is gutless and boring, pandering to the audience rather than challenging it to learn something. It's the kind of thing journalists learn to do through undergrad work in corporate communications. That's hardly an environment renowned for challenging anything. Yer welcome.

Burke updated?

2005-12-27T20:46:00.000-08:00

The WSJ is carrying Jeffery Hart's attempt to place Burke in our present context and while I don't agree with everything he suggests, it makes for a worthy read. Here are three of Hart's updated "Burkean" takes that I like:

Beauty. Beauty has been clamorously present in the American Conservative Mind through its almost total absence. The tradition of regard for woodland and wildlife was present from the beginnings of the nation and continued through conservative exemplars such as the Republican Theodore Roosevelt, who established the National Parks. Embarrassingly for conservatives (at least one hopes it is embarrassing), stewardship of the environment is now left mostly to liberal Democrats. Not all ideas and initiatives by liberals are bad ones. Burke's unbought beauties are part of civilized life, and therefore ought to occupy much of the Conservative Mind. The absence of this consideration remains a mark of yahooism and is prominent in Republicanism today. As if by an intrinsic law, when the free market becomes a kind of utopianism it maximizes ordinary human imperfection--here, greed, short views and the resulting barbarism.
Constitutional government. Depending on English tradition and classical theory, the Founders designed a government by the "deliberate sense" of the people. The "sense" originated with the people, but it was made "deliberate" by the delaying institutions built into the constitutional structure. This system aims at government not by majorities alone but by stable consensus, because under the Constitution major changes almost always require a consensus that lasts over a considerable period of time. Though the Supreme Court stands as constitutional arbiter, it is not a legislature. The correct workings of the system depend upon mutual restraint among the branches. And the court, which is the weakest of the three, should behave with due modesty toward the legislature. The legislature is the closest to "We the people," the basis of legitimacy in a free society. Legislation is more easily revised or repealed than a court ruling, and therefore judicial restraint is necessary.
Religion. Religion is an integral part of the distinctive identity of Western civilization. But this recognition is only manifest in traditional forms of religion--repeat, traditional, or intellectually and institutionally developed, not dependent upon spasms of emotion. This meant religion in its magisterial forms. What the time calls for is a recovery of the great structure of metaphysics, with the Resurrection as its fulcrum, established as history, and interpreted through Greek philosophy. The representation of this metaphysics through language and ritual took 10 centuries to perfect. The dome of the sacred, however, has been shattered. The act of reconstruction will require a large effort of intellect, which is never populist and certainly not grounded on emotion, an unreliable guide. Religion not based on a structure of thought always exhibits wild inspired swings and fades in a generation or two.

Aristotle never heard of Jesus

2005-12-27T18:31:00.000-08:00

As a way of describing the old church in Europe, Oxford historian Diarmaid MacCulloch relates an old German Easter tradition:

At the Holy Spirit's festival of Whitsuntide in the Bavarian diocese of Eichstadtt, a carved wooden dove of the Spirit was lowered down on the congregation through a hole in the church roof vaulting... the dove was closely followed by bucketfuls of of water, and the member of the congregation most thoroughly soaked became the town's Pfingstvogel for the coming year. Clergy might grumble about some of this excess and try to stop it, but in fact it was proof of a huge stability in the old religion: the apparent irreverence was itself a symptom of how strongly the majority of the people felt faith in the system, and how much they could relax in it. A problem would only arise if the faithful began listening to a question: was the Mass, the linchpin of it all, in fact what it claimed to be?

The question arose because the western Church tried to offer an explanation for the miracle of the mass, and it did so using the best intellectual system available to it, scholasticism.

The dominant philosophical system within scholasticism, and so the best analysis of the Mass in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, adapted the scientific method of the pre Christian philosopher Aristotle for Christian purposes. This adaptation reached its highest level in the works of the thirteenth century Dominican genius, Thomas Aquinas (the basis if the intellectual system known as Thomism). Aquinas was determined to show that human reason was a gift of God designed to give human beings as much understanding of divine mysteries as they needed. He formalized and systematized earlier discussion of the miracle of the Mass, and adopted a term which had become increasingly popular in explanations of what happened in this miracle: transubstantiation.

MacCulloch sketches Aristotle's method and Aquinas' use of it as follows:

Aristotle divided the being of a particular object into substance and accidents. Take a sheep, for instance: its substance, which is its reality, its participation in the universal quality of being a sheep, is manifested in its gambolling on the hills, munching grass, and baaing. Its accidents are things particular to the individual sheep at which we are looking: the statistics of its weight, the curliness of its wool, or the timbre of its baa. When the sheep dies, it ceases to gambol on the hills, munch on grass and baa: its substance, it's 'sheepness' is instantly extinguished, and only the accidents remain - and they will gradually decay... its former sheepness... ended with the extinguishing of its substance in death. It is no longer a sheep. How... might we apply what is true of a sheep to the miracle of the Mass? We start with bread (we could equally start with wine). Bread consists of substance and accidents: its substance is its participation in the universal quality of 'breadness', while its accidents are the particular appearance of this piece of bread (being round, white and wafer like, for instance). In the Mass, the substance changes, accidents do not - why should they? The are not significant for being. Through the grace of God, the substance is replaced by the substance of the body of Christ. It is a satisfyingly reverent analysis: as long, that is, as one accepts Thomas' scientific or philosophical premises of the language of substance and accidents, affirming the conception of universal realities which are greater than individual instances, such as being a sheep or being bread, rather than particular instances of sheep or bread. From the fourteenth century, most philosophers and theologians, particularly in northern Europe, did not in fact believe this. They were nominalists, who rejected Aristotle's categories and thought that words like 'sheep' or 'bread' as simply nomina (names), which we choose in an arbitrary fashion to use as labels for collections of objects that we decided to say are like each other. Nominalists could only say of transubstantiation as a theory of the Mass that it that is was supported by the weight of opinion by many holy men in the church, and therefore it ought not to be approached through the Thomist paths of reason, but must be accepted as a matter of faith. Once that faith in the Church's medieval authorities was challenged, as it was in the sixteenth century, the basis for for belief in transubstantiation was gone, unless one returned to Thomism, the thought of Aquinas. Those who remained in the Roman obedience generally did this, but in the sixteenth century Europe, thousands of Protestants were burned at the stake for denying an idea of Aristotle, who had never heard of Jesus.

As this crucial excerpt shows, MacCulloch has a fine way with words, as well as with getting to the point of the matter. It's fascinating to me how faith is at the root of all of the positions described above, even those who take pains to avoid it. One can believe in the traditional Mass because one believes in Jesus' discourse on 'the bread of life' in the Bible, or one can believe it because one trusts in the teaching authority of the Church, or one can find a way into it through the premises of Aquinas' scholastic study of the matter. What happens in the period just preceding the Reformation is that a lot of ancient books that had been lost begin to find their way back into the hands of scholars in the west. This is a good thing but it is unsettling and it forces people to examine questions that earlier generations had had no reason to question. Improved scholarship proves that the document known as the Donation of Constantine is a forgery, and it also begins to question the Vulgate, Jerome's translation of the Bible that had been the common source for most of Rome's theological deliberations. If your faith had rested on the saintliness of the Vatican hierarchy, or its' scholarly perfection, you now found yourself in bit of a pickle. What's more, you began to have more intellectual options open up before you as the printing press began to ciculate other ancient authors, and even contemporary social critics. These are not bad things provided that you clearly know what you believe and why, but for many it was too much. A faith that rests on pillars like human authority or human holiness is a weak one in any case. It refuses to take full adult responsibility for the choice facing mankind, ie. all knowledge begins with a leap of faith, and seeks instead to pin the decision on some one or something else. We should not be surprised to see that authority be crushed by such a burden. Pope Ratzinger has, instead, described the Church as being centered on the sacraments:

The holiness of the Church consists in that power of sanctification which God exerts in her in spite of human sinfulness.

A sacramental faith stands or falls on faith alone - just as Luther and others would argue faith should. It is not subject to testing - it is subject only to assent. Doubting the sacraments is not synonymous with doubting the ability to reason, but it is the same type of error. It should not therefore surprise us that those lacking a sacramental faith, once the prop of Papal authority was edited into a shape they would not recognize, began to turn their doubt on more and more of what surrounded them. Tellingly, Luther did retain a sacramental outlook to a large degree, enough that later reformers would come to doubt his ability to think. I would describe their attacks on him at that point as doubting his ability to doubt as muscularly as they. Thinking and doubting began to become blurred, where they remain in some circles to this day.

A very limited form of inquiry

2005-12-27T11:53:00.000-08:00

Real Clear Politics is carrying commentary on James Q. Wilson's WSJ article on ID (got that?). Wilson, the respected social scientist, gets it mostly right when he says that ID is not science because it can't be tested:

So ID is not science. Does this mean that science, in any way, implies the non-existence of God? No. Does this mean that belief in God is irrational and that we should all be "free thinkers"? No. Does this mean that it is impossible to arbitrate between various theories of the existence/non-existence of God and come to some reasonable conclusions? No. Does this mean that we cannot say that humanity is meant to exist? No. In other words, rationality outside of science is quite possible, and has been around for a long time. How do you think humanity invented science in the first place? We surely did not do it scientifically. Science as we know it is the product of millennia of philosophical debate -- from Aristotle to Lakatos. Science depends upon philosophy, which itself is unfalsifiable and unscientific. The debate about ID has been blown way out of proportion because of the social status that science has acquired in 21st century Western society. For better or for worse, deserved or undeserved, science is a very powerful concept. It is quite coercive. If somebody tells you that you are not being scientific, you will probably take that as a criticism. You should not necessarily, though. The fact of the matter is that, despite the message of our culture about the authority of science, it is not the end-all-be-all of rational thought. Science is a very limited form of inquiry that produces results that are, from a certain perspective and with certain assumptions, reliable. But they also do not tell us all of the things we need, or want, to know about life. Man cannot live by science alone. Neither, for that matter, can science. Do you have a snarky friend who thinks that science is the only legitimate type of inquiry? Tell him to prove that one scientifically!

When I write on this subject (and I probably do it too much) I sometimes get comments to the effect that I'm bashing science because I'm trying to prop up a religious agenda. This is wrong on two counts. I love science and always have, ever since the elementary grades when I was fascinated with dinosaurs and the solar system. As a teen I read a lot of science fiction, always preferring 'hard' SF to fantasy SF, A.C. Clark and Greg Egan to George Lucas and Gene Rodenberry. It was that respect and affection that lead lead me to the philosophy of science after leaving the university, because I wanted to know the thing better, even if I was a 'mere' Arts grad. In this field you can call me a reformer, a scientific Protestant, trying to keep the thing honest and true.

The same can't be said for theology, where I'm thoroughly orthodox, and orthodox for the same reasons I quoted above. Faith comes before thought, and allows it to stand before reasonable criticism. I've been working my way into Diarmaid MacCulloch's history of The Reformation, and it's a really excellent book, one that's hard to put down. I'm trying to better understand the period, the characters and ideas that shaped it. I want to better understand what the reformers were saying, and are saying today. Thus far I've gotten through the description of the old order, of Luther, and now of Zwingli. I must confess that I find it difficult to be sympathetic. The old order had problems, sure. It had always had problems and had always contained waves of reform, as it still does. I plan to except parts of the book here for the next little while (it's a 700 page book) and discuss the ideas presented. I'll be as fair as I can but I will try and show why it is that I think Luther and Zwingli are second rate theologians who were taken advantage of by lay authorities seeking to expand their powers, and by even more radical followers who were even worse thinkers. I can't yet speak to Calvin or later thinkers because I haven't covered that ground yet. I hope my Protestant readers will enjoy the posts and correct me if I misrepresent them. I intend a lively but fair series, not too different from the way I've covered ID except for being more systematic. MacCulloch, in case anyone is wondering, is no Hillaire Belloc. He's an Anglican, of Scottish Episcopalian heritage, and can trace family ties to the clergy back to the 1890's. He does not appear claim to be a firm follower of any branch of the faith. He is a professor of history at Oxford and this book won both the Wolfson prize for history in 2004 and the British Academy Book Prize for the same year.

Idealism and commitment, tempered with warmth

2005-12-26T09:26:00.000-08:00

John Cavadini, chairman of theology at the University of Notre Dame, speaking about JPII Catholics:

What they see in him is perhaps something that youth of any age and period admire: idealism and commitment, tempered with warmth. John Paul has the ability to state ideals forthrightly without closing off openness toward the 'other,' regardless of the other's religion or lack thereof. Like our millennial youth, John Paul seems to respect, as something sacred, religious faith and moral commitment wherever he finds it. He sees it as a basis for the building of what he calls the 'civilization of love.' Without wanting to minimize the problems or real inconsistencies in the position of our younger brothers and sisters in Christ, are they not, in some sense, especially the children of this pope in this regard? In their abiding affection for Catholicism, coupled with an openness toward other faiths, could we not see an intuition, not of relativism, but of a religious alternative to the indifferentism of secular culture? In place of the secular ideals of 'tolerance' or 'respect for difference' simply as difference, is there among young Catholics a sense of love or charity founded on and in the Christian faith itself? On the one hand, charity makes no sense apart from the truth of the Catholic faith that proclaims the love revealed in the Incarnation as the absolute and final revelation. And yet it is that very charity that 'bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things' (1 Cor 13:7) and so, in its very absoluteness, intrinsically implies an openness as well. This means that the evangelization of our youth should be aimed, not at undoing the 'inconsistency' that Davidson and Hoge point to, but at making articulate the inarticulate commitments that are implicitly folded in the 'joy and hope' this very striking juxtaposition seems to embody.

Fr. Neuhaus puts it like this:"There is a very big difference between tolerating others because nobody has the truth and being convinced of the truth that we are to love those with whom we disagree about the truth."

Last minute christmas suggestions

2005-12-22T21:02:00.000-08:00

Suggestions fror the coming Christmas season: Loreena McKennit, Songs for the Season. Even though McKennit has not released an album in something like a decade, I've only just discovered her and she's amazing. This little EP has only five songs on it and Canadians can pick it up on iTunes for about $4 and change. Amazon wants ten US bucks... Richard Proulx and the Cathedral Singers, Catholic Latin Classics. It's not a Christmas album per se, but it'll sound terrific. Magnificat. This is a really nice daily missal. Fourteen issues a year include two special editions for Holy week and Christmas. Each issue has all of the masses for each day of the month, and a couple of features about historical artworks, poems, and faith issues. These are really nice and I'm glad my wife has deemed me worthy of one.

No harm, no foul?

2005-12-21T20:08:00.000-08:00

Canada's Supreme farce is carrying on it's merry way, ruling today that swinger's clubs must be allowed to operate legally:

In its 7-2 decision, the court redefined indecency to use harm, rather than community standards, as the key yardstick. The ruling, written by Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, said acts must be shown to be harmful to the point where they "interfere with the proper functioning of society" before they can be labelled indecent. "Grounding criminal indecency in harm represents an important advance in this difficult area of law."

McLachlin is attempting to argue that public standards for behavior are and can only be arbitrary, whereas "harm" is supposedly scientifically objective, supposedly a higher threshold to meet, and thereby a guarantor of greater liberty. McLachlin is a Liberal party appointee, btw - remember this during the election if this ruling bothers you (and she looks rather like a dom in that Wikki picture, don't you think?). I don't buy this argument; I don't believe that community standards are arbitrary. Instead they simply point to cause and effect relationships that are hard to quantify. A judge asked to rule based on community standards is not being asked what his personal opinion of the matter is; he's being asked to assess, and represent, his community. Consider what "harm" is. How do we define it? Any choice is going to arbitrary. Words are a currency floated on public opinion. They point to supposedly real things but they are not themselves those things. They are words. Placeholders, if you will, for public consensus. I don't want to get into a discussion of hermenutics here but want to point out that all of this jiggery pokery about "objectivity" and "greater freedom" is simply a power grab. We are being asked to surrender our humanity here, as we are so often when we deal with "Liberal" justice. This is a party that thinks mom and dad can't be trusted to raise their kids, that thinks mom and dad "lack public accountability" and will spend daycare money on cigarettes and popcorn. What they are saying, and this gets clearer all the time, is that only the Liberal Party is fit to decide. That is Liberals mean by objectivity; the elites will decide, not the community. This is a terrible ruling, but like most sexual issues it will take time to make its effects felt. Even then, they may not be easy to see on a sociological or economic sense. Take at this story from the Washington Times about a study linking teen hedonism and depression:

Most medical and mental health professionals would agree that there is a link between depression and sexual and drug using behavior in adolescents. However, it is commonly assumed that depressed teens use sex and drugs to "medicate" their depression. Thus, when faced with a depressed, sexually active teen, adults may overlook sexual or drug using behavior with the hope that the risky behavior will cease once the depression is gone. Although the depression followed by sex and drugs link seems to make sense, a new study, which followed over 13,000 middle and high school students for two years in a row, found that depression did not predict risky sexual or drug using behavior. Instead, the study found that depression often follows risky behavior. Lead author of the study, Dr. Denise Hallfors told me in an interview that her research team found evidence that heavy drug and alcohol use significantly increased the likelihood of depression among boys. For girls, the findings are stunning: Even low levels of alcohol, drug or sexual experimentation increased the probability of depression for girls. ... Girls even experimenting with drugs were slightly more than two times as likely to be depressed (8-10 percent). Those experimenting with sex were three times more likely to be depressed than abstainers (12 percent versus 4 percent). For sexually promiscuous teen girls, the results are staggering: 44 percent of girls with multiple sexual partners during the study period experienced depression.

Causation is admittedly a difficult subject. My sense is that the difficulty in mapping out the relationship means that there is not enough evidence to overturn the community. Since the age of consent in Canada is woefully low - 14, a Tory bill to raise it to 16 was defeated in the last session - this means that girls as young as 14 can be lured into swingers clubs and there is nary anything anyone (even a parent) can do about it. The drinking age here is 18, which might be a reason to keep young teens out, but a savvy club owner could simply opt not to serve alcohol. For the girls it will mean depression, a horribly skewed opinion of the male gender, and possibly STD's that will follow her for the rest of her life, and even make her sterile. She can consent to all of this, but she can't consent to a beer. The mind reels and the heart breaks. And I have not even said anything much about how many unborn kids will face the butchers block because of this ruling. It seems the word "child" is in danger of speaking to nothing but diminutive size.

Emotional investment in ideas

2005-12-21T16:12:00.000-08:00

I love the internet. Link-ity link and look what I found:

One of the problems is with our elites. We are wrong to think that the difficulty lies in the uneducated and unsophisticated masses--as if inadequate education, in and of itself, is the problem. As a matter of fact, no one is more prone to illusions than the intellectual. It has been said that philosophy is simply personal error on a grandiose scale. Complicating matters is the fact that intellectuals are hardly immune to a deep emotional investment in their ideas, no less than the religious individual. The word "belief" is etymologically linked to the word "beloved," and it is easy to see how certain ideas, no matter how dysfunctional--for example, some of the undeniably appealing ideas underpinning contemporary liberalism--are beloved by those who believe them. Thus, many liberal ideas are believed not because they are true, but because they are beautiful. Then, the intellectual simply marshals their intelligence in service of legitimizing the beliefs that they already hold. It has long been understood by psychoanalysts that for most people, reason is the slave of the passions. Underneath the intellectual's attachment to the dysfunctional idea is a more insidious fear that their entire intellectual cathedral, carefully constructed over a lifetime, will collapse in ruins. Religious people are not as prone to this same fear, because they accept it that their religion is ultimately based on a leap of faith. One can see how this is playing out, for example, in the intellgent design debate that has philosophical materialists frothing at the mouth. Intellectuals live under the illusion that their system is based solely on facts and logic, which is easily disproved, even with regard to mathematical knowledge (for example, Godel's theorems prove that there is no formal system that does not contain assumptions unwarranted and unproveable by the system). For most intellectuals, understanding actually precedes knowledge... That liberalism is a new pseudo-religion seems quite obvious to me. While it is true that the conservative intellectual movement includes religious groups, it has been my experience that conservatism actually maintains a far clearer separation of religious and political impulses than liberalism, simply because it acknowledges a sharp difference between the two. Since leftism denies the existence of spirit, it ends up conflating politics and gnostic spirituality into a single ideology that is neither politics nor religion, but a monstrous hybrid of the two.

I don't think that the intellectual is more subject to this problem of episteme. He is, instead, more likely to fool himself on this account. To say he's a nattier intellectual dresser would be a truer rendering of the matter. Underneath it all, naked is still naked.

Phillip Pullman, Church of England atheist

2005-12-20T21:42:00.000-08:00

" ... after his brothers had gone up to the feast, then [Jesus] also went up, not publicly but in private" The New Yorker takes a look at another Oxford based writer and decides to treat this one with kid gloves. They treated C.S. Lewis a little more roughly not too long ago.

[Phillip] Pullman’s initial encounters with religion were largely benign, owing to his beloved grandfather. Although he became a skeptic early on—“for all the usual reasons”—he kept his thoughts to himself. “I didn’t want to upset him,” he said of his grandfather. “I knew I wouldn’t have changed his mind.” And, for Pullman, his grandfather’s most important quality was his “big soul.” He added, “Although I call myself an atheist, I am a Church of England atheist, and a 1662 Book of Common Prayer atheist, because that’s the tradition I was brought up in and I cannot escape those early influences.” In “His Dark Materials,” Pullman’s criticisms of organized religion come across as anti-authoritarian and anti-ascetic rather than anti-doctrinal. (Jesus isn’t mentioned in any of the books, although Pullman has hinted that He might figure in a forthcoming sequel, “The Book of Dust.”) His fundamental objection is to ideological tyranny and the rejection of this world in favor of an idealized afterlife, regardless of creed. As one of the novel’s pagan characters puts it, “Every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling.”

I haven't read any of Pullman's works and - if I am honest - I have no desire to. Pullman appears to come from the anarchistic side of Christianity, which is not an area of much interest to me. It seems that even the very accommodating Anglican Church is not quite good enough for Pullman, despite it finding him to be of interest (Rowan Williams seems to like him according to the Wikkipedia). One has to be careful about attributing to a writer the words of any of his fictional characters, so I can't say that Pullman thinks all of Christianity - heck, all of monotheism - is tyrannical and necessarily ascetic. Nonetheless, given the tenor of his comments in interviews and much of his work, one could say that this is a view that he flirts with. A lot. I find it hard to see how Pullman can describe the Anglicans (!) as wanting to "obliterate every good feeling." One imagines little child Phillip's hide quivering in a rage after being scolded for eating his cake before diner and the grown man still, inexplicably, thinking that the message was tyrannical asceticism saying "cake is bad!" Most didn't get that message. Perhaps through trial and error when mom and dad were not looking, we concluded that cake really does go down better after diner than before. The cake has not been obliterated, the child Pullman has simply been told about the real world consequences of trying to replace healthy foods with foods that might be more pleasing in the short term. Even if his characterization of the Anglican communion were fair, it is a mistake to leap from that to generalizing about the "inherent" nature of all Christianity and even all of monotheism. For one thing, the number and variety of Protestant sects is so numerous that I find it difficult to generalize about them at all and when I do I'm almost sure to get comments to the effect that what I've said "isn't true of me and my friends." So Pullman is being sloppy. Closer to home, my own Church does not reject this world outright. It is described as God's creation and good, even if it isn't our final resting place. People don't stay in hospitals after they are well; that doesn't mean that hospital's are "rejected." I have recently begun reading a book by another disbelieving Anglican on the subject of the Reformation and Diarmaid MacCullough's Reformation: Europe's House Divided provides a lot of evidence that Christian communities have taken a number of different shapes over the years. If one points to the abuses like the Inquisition, the Bogia Popes, or the Portugese slave trade and says "here is your Christianity. This is what it is", then one has greatly simplified things. One is being a partisan, and can thus be dismissed from serious discussion. People with an interest in the truth know that the real story is more complicated than that. The Portugese slavers faced resistance from various religious orders, and that resistance very often took the form of arguing that slavery was contrary to the Natural Law. What we really have going on is an ongoing fight over who and what can be reasonably considered Christian. That fight continues to this day and when Pullman says he is "a Church of England atheist" he is in a sense saying that that church is not worthy of the title. It's a shame that Pullman resorts to such tactics. Even though my own views are quite different from his, I am not so different that I can't read this passage and agree:

Near the end of “The Golden Compass,” Lord Asriel asks Lyra to bring him a copy of the Bible, and he reads her a passage from Genesis. In Lyra’s world, the Bible isn’t quite the same as ours: when Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit, the first thing they see is the adult form of their daemons. “But it en’t true, is it?” Lyra asks of the story. “Not true like chemistry or engineering, not that kind of true? There wasn’t really an Adam and Eve?” Lord Asriel tells her to think of the story as an “imaginary number, like the square root of minus one.” Its truth might not be tangible, but you can use it to calculate “all manner of things that couldn’t be imagined without it.” The metaphor is not just cunning; it helps explain why Pullman, a champion of science, writes in the fantastic mode.

The fantastic mode. Ah, now we are getting somewhere, and science has nothing whatever to do with it. J.R.R. Tolkein, about whom who Pullman has nothing kind to say, would have grasped the Pullman's point immediately. It's a shame Pullman is so closed minded he's never bothered to find out what Tolkien was about. A kinder and more intelligent take on the matter can be read here. Jordan is gnostic, not atheist, and can discuss his interpretations without needlessly running down those who open themselves up to the possibility that incarnation is historical fact. I personally think that divine hiddeness is something that we all wrestle with, and it accounts for the differences of opinion that can occur between reasonable people on these issues. I have been thinking a lot about this passage from John 7:1 since it came up in one of the daily readings last week.

After this Jesus went about in Galilee. He would not go about in Judea, because the Jews were seeking to kill him. Now the Jews' Feast of Booths was at hand. So his brothers said to him, “Leave here and go to Judea, that your disciples also may see the works you are doing. For no one works in secret if he seeks to be known openly. If you do these things, show yourself to the world.” For not even his brothers believed in him. Jesus said to them, “My time has not yet come, but your time is always here. The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify about it that its works are evil. You go up to the feast. I am not going up to this feast, for my time has not yet fully come.” After saying this, he remained in Galilee. But after his brothers had gone up to the feast, then he also went up, not publicly but in private. The Jews were looking for him at the feast, and saying, “Where is he?” And there was much muttering about him among the people. While some said, “He is a good man,” others said, “No, he is leading the people astray.” Yet for fear of the Jews no one spoke openly of him.

The image of Jesus hiding in the crowd is really striking, and one to think of when you feel that you're losing sight of him. He plainly does not care to be "known openly." Less relevant to this post, but also interesting is that the disciples ask Jesus to go public, something they themselves fear to do.

What is your model of the Church?

2005-12-17T19:59:00.000-08:00

Don't be fooled, this quiz is a lot more thoughful than it sounds.

You scored as Sacrament model. Your model of the church is Sacrament. The church is the effective sign of the revelation that is the person of Jesus Christ. Christians are transformed by Christ and then become a beacon of Christ wherever they go. This model has a remarkable capacity for integrating other models of the church.

Sacrament model

89%

Mystical Communion Model

78%

Institutional Model

61%

Herald Model

56%

Servant Model

50%

What is your model of the church? [Dulles]
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Sorry about the lack of posts. I am - there is no other way to say it - feeling mighty lethargic at the moment.

More Poco Hall Rental Bulls**t

2005-12-14T13:28:00.000-08:00

See here.

Scott Adams on God

2005-12-13T20:44:00.000-08:00

Scott Adams, creator of the popular Dilbert comic strip, has been thinking aloud about God - with very interesting results, not the kind of stuff you might stereotypically associate with an Engineer. I have to applaud Adam's ability to resist needlessly anthropomorphizing God in all of the ways that the typical atheist / agnostic does. Hey, I was one, so I know, OK? Andrew can consider this post my response to his e-mailing me this article from NPR if he wants to. Welcome back to blogging, btw! Adams writes:

What about consciousness? You'd expect God to be conscious as we understand it, right? But that wouldn't make sense for an omnipotent being. Our own consciousness is mostly about imagining what can happen next and comparing it to what does so we can adjust accordingly. That's useful for survival, but only for slow procreating creatures that are made of meat and surrounded by carnivores. God wouldn't need that sort of imagination because omnipotence means your preferences are the same as reality. There's no point in being almighty if you have to sit around imagining what you want and then waiting for it. So God would have no use for consciousness. All that's left of intelligence that is consistent with an omnipotent God is the ability to do complex things. That might not be part of the definition of intelligence in your dictionary, but it should be. Allow me to explain by analogy. A baby is not the same as the adult it later grows into. Yet we consider them to be the same person. Where do you draw the line between the early form of something and what it later becomes? It's mostly a point of view. There's no objective way to decide. I choose to define any process that can create intelligence as the initial phase of that intelligence. That seems perfectly fair to me. [there's no positive evidence for it, but throughout history it has appealed to great numbers of people. There is also the small problem of a lack of positive proof for positivism. - ed.] And here's where it gets interesting, in case you wondered when. Atheists believe that our existence is the result of matter and energy bumping around according to the laws of physics. In other words, the universe has the ability to do complex things. The universe is intelligent in precisely and exclusively the way an omnipotent God would be, according to me, your source of all useful knowledge. But what about design? Atheists say the universe was built without the need for design. I think it's worth noting that if humans could build great things without the need for user specifications and written plans, we'd do it that way too. So when we impose the need for human-like design processes on an omnipotent being, we're selling God short. He'd do it his own way. And that might involve a relatively short list of physical laws, a bunch of matter, and a lot of space-time. If you accept that God's design process wouldn't mean the same as human design processes, and intelligence for God doesn't mean the same as intelligence for humans, then it's hard to argue against Intelligent Design. Rationally defined, both intelligence and design - when applied to an omnipotent being - look exactly like the laws of nature, and no one doubts that those exist. All that's left then is the question of God's existence. Yes, I will be answering that question here. That's why you came to the Dilbert Blog, isn't it? God, by any definition, is not part of our natural world. He's above it, whatever that means. And yet he exerts an all-powerful force upon it. What do we all know from our common experience that meets that test? Concepts. Allow me to explain again by analogy. We believe that love exists, yet it is little more than the sum of the biology and situation that evoke it. Love itself is simply an umbrella concept that contains all of those chemical reactions and environmental happenings. Love is supernatural in that sense, as all concepts are. Even the biggest atheist would agree that God exists as a concept. And that concept is undeniably the most powerful one in existence. It influences virtually every human activity from procreation to war.

As I was saying, Adams gets a lot right, but from my perspective he does not - yet - have all of the pieces. He's using a fine mind to get to this point and if he continues to dwell on the relationship between evolution and intelligence he may get there yet. I don't think there is a clear cut relationship between intelligence and enhanced survival. Ants are dumb but long lived by virtue of niche adaptability and a very high reproductive rate. They have taken a different route on the evolutionary tree and I don't see that their survival rate is any less for that. Then there is the question of how an evolved mind relates to the question of big T truth. There is simply no clear relationship. The evolved mind is a chance creation, selected for by it's adaptability. If mere coherentism is evolutionary cheaper, that's the route it'll take. Consider the following argument:

Our limited minds can discover eternal truths about being.
Truth properly resides in a mind.
The human mind is not eternal.
Therefore, there must exist an eternal mind in which these truths reside.

I don't think anyone would question points two and three very much, so I'll leave them aside. Point one is the most likely bone of contention since it makes a positive statement and we lack the ability to verify it in a positive way. Proofs for point one are of necessity going to be of a logical, metaphysical nature. I accept this argument. Adams' post today comes close to saying the same, but in the end stops short of considering the universe as the product of a divine mind. The resulting ideas are tantalizing but remain flies stuck in amber, unable to explain 1) freedom in a world of material, mechanical necessity, and 2) unable to justify trust in the ability to think real truths. The solution is not that God is a human concept, it is that we are God's concepts. That is where freedom and intelligence comes from, that is why we say 'man is made in the image of God.'

Small birds that land in curiosity

2005-12-13T12:12:00.000-08:00

From 30 Days, an interview with Cardinal Godfried Danneels on the subject of the liturgy:

Cardinal Godfried Danneels:Many African and Asian bishops have spoken to me about “threshold proselytes…” Who are they? DANNEELS: They’re the polygamists, the non-baptized, even Moslems who look in through the door of the Church attracted by the beauty of the liturgy. They feel there’s something going on… What else struck you during the Synod? DANNEELS: The underlining of the sacrificial character of the Eucharist, which to tell the truth had never been denied. But that at a certain moment, after the Council, had been confined to the shade, and the stress was put on the Eucharist as banquet. But the Last Supper was not a simple group meal. It was a ceremonial and at the same time sacrificial banquet. The apostles and Jesus did not meet in the cenacle only to eat together like all the other times. But to remember the paschal meal of the Hebrews, and commemorate the work of salvation performed by God in Egypt... Worship is also a very traditional practice. DANNEELS: I notice that many young people discover it as a new thing. One saw that in Cologne also. Or in the silent adoration of the First Communion children, in Saint Peter’s square, on October 15. Young people appreciate a faith announced without packaging, without endless preambles and “trick” of pre-evangelization. They are open to those who witness the Christian faith to them in freedom, without trying to convince them by putting pressure on their freedom. They’re like the small birds that land in curiosity on the windowsill. One shouldn’t try to catch them. The sacraments themselves are a visible fact. DANNEELS: The sacraments are concrete gestures, that make use of materials signs. The sign is always visible, but is always a sign of something of not visible: the res sacramenti that is communicated through the sign. There lies the force of the liturgy. This res is not perceptible when the liturgy becomes theater, self-celebration constructed by us. And precisely when that happens the liturgy becomes something of a burden. There’s no sense in going to the same piece of theater each Sunday... The sacramental signs present themselves with the features of humility. They are simple, ordinary, poor: water, bread, wine, oil. It’s not a matter of making an impression, of staging with special effects. The liturgy with its repeated and discreet gestures suggests, is the suggestion of invisible reality of which the effects are seen. And the subject of the liturgical and sacramental action is Christ himself.

Redemptionis Sacramentum

2005-12-13T08:42:00.000-08:00

Thank you to Rick and Kristina and others who commented on my post about our parish's liturgical meeting this past weekend, and to Tony, who sent a very supportive e-mail. Rick and Kristina pointed me towards a document called Redemptionis Sacramentum, which will be quite helpful, I think. Looking back at the Easter mime incident, for example, I can see issues with Chapter 3, sections 58 to 63. A summary of the document can be found here.

What is your style of American Catholicism?

2005-12-12T15:13:00.000-08:00

Another quiz? yes, because I'm busy with Christmas preparations today...

You scored as New Catholic. The years following the Second Vatican Council was a time of collapse of the Catholic faith and its traditions. But you are a young person who has rediscovered this lost faith, probably due to the evangelization of Pope John Paul II. You are enthusiastic, refreshing, and somewhat traditional, and you may be considering a vocation to the priesthood or religious life. You reject relativism and the decline in society that you see among your peers. You are seen as being good for the Church. A possible problem is that you may have a too narrow a view of orthodoxy, and anyway, you are still a youth and not yet mature in your faith.

New Catholic

71%

Traditional Catholic

64%

Neo-Conservative Catholic

52%

Radical Catholic

33%

Evangelical Catholic

17%

Lukewarm Catholic

17%

Liberal Catholic

10%

What is your style of American Catholicism? created with QuizFarm.com

What political stereotype are you?

2005-12-12T09:08:00.000-08:00

Republican - You believe that the free market will
take care of most things, but that the
government should be there with moderate
taxation to provide for national defense and
enforcing morality. Your historical role model
is Ronald Reagan.

Which political sterotype are you?
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Aggiornamento

2005-12-10T19:47:00.000-08:00

"Our Father, who art in Heaven... " This article from Crisis is speaking my mind today:

Among Lumen Gentium's strongest emphases is the laity's call to "make Christ known to others... by the testimony of a life resplendent in faith, hope and charity." The laity's means of drawing on these virtues are rooted in the closeness of man's relationship to God through the person of Christ. The council Fathers understood that the laity were to find courage enough in this bond to accomplish the work set out for them by it: "Let them not, then, hide this hope in the depths of their hearts, but even in the program of their secular life let them express it by a continual conversion and by wrestling 'against the world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness' (Eph 6:12)." This is Vatican II at its boldest and truest: The call for aggiornamento does not mean an accommodation to the world but rather a Christ-centered contradiction of it in the immediacy of daily life. John Paul II counseled as much in the signal phrase of his papacy, "Be not afraid!" expressed first during his opening homily as pontiff. Some 27 years later, Benedict XVI offered a profound restatement of his predecessor's hallmark sentence in his own opening homily as pontiff: "Do not be afraid of Christ!" It is this fear that, in part, accounts for post - Vatican II Catholicism's obsessions with what the council may or may not have meant. By focusing on these matters - to the exclusion of the Church's status as the bride and mystical body of Christ - Catholics have let theology degenerate into sociology, politics, and self-interested name-calling. They have thereby ignored the foremost message of the council, encapsulated in Lumen Gentium's opening: "Christ is the light of the nations. Because this is so, this sacred synod gathered together in the Holy Spirit eagerly desires, by proclaiming the Gospel to every creature... to bring the light of Christ to all men, a light brightly visible on the countenance of the Church." To bear this light in its Christ-centered fullness is the mission of the Church and of every Catholic, and this has been so from Pentecost through the 21st century. The Second Vatican Council, through John Paul II, told Catholics and the world to fear not because of Christ. This was a message needed in a time of regnant, atheist ideologies. The council, through Benedict XVI, tells Catholics and the world to fear not Christ Himself. This is a challenge that both testifies to weakened convictions about Christianity's particularity in the present age and proposes Christ alone as the only possible point of origin for future renewals of the Church and the world.

Our parish priest has put in his one year of getting settled in and observing how the parish runs and at a meeting for all of us involved in the liturgy he let it be known that he has ideas about "improving things." Last Easter he "improved" the Mass by replacing the reading of the Passion (!) with mime of the crucifixion set to music and performed by school kids of various ages. I was horrified but said nothing. He let us know today that somebody did, in fact, call the Chancery Office to complain and he was reprimanded. He voiced disappointment that we had people so unwilling to "open up." The real kicker came when he mentioned that he has been trying to work in more "inclusive" language but is worried about how things will go if he was to go as far as offering a prayer to 'God the Father, the Mother, and so much more." I knew Father X, who is the only priest in the parish at the moment, was a liberal Jesuit. I didn't think it would go this far, however. I feel like I have been sucker punched in the stomach. I've been miserable since I came home from the meeting, wondering how this is going to play out. I know many people in the parish who were not there who would find all of this objectionable. The only voices at the meeting were in favour, but they made up only about 1/4 of all who were there. I suspect that there were many like myself who were simply too surprised - and of a non combative nature - to say anything at the time. That 1/4 were mostly a few old women (not a majority), so I don't know where he gets the idea that his opposition consists entirely of "culturally bound" old timers. I was one of the youngest people there! Personally I don't know why people who want these things always want to take over the Mass with them. Go to, I say, and respect that the Mass is not mass entertainment. Ignorant people should not go mucking about with something as carefully thought out and evolved as the Mass. This is not a democracy, thank Heaven; expertise counts. In the long term I do not think that Pope Benedict will side with this kind of silliness, which Father X insisted is what he was always taught at seminary and which is already practised in parishes in eastern Canada, where he was based for many years. He also suggested that the Canadian Council of Bishops is okey dokey with this sort of thing too. I'm left with the problem of how to respond in the short term, which could last for many years. I'm a lector, which means that I do Bible readings at Mass about once a month. If am ever handed an "amendment" to a Bible reading I will ignore it or refuse to read. Beyond that, I'm not sure. What I am sure of is that God chose a man's body for the incarnation, and while he was incarnated he always referred to God as Father. Now I know that God has no gender but I respect his revelatory choices as being worthy of remembrance and reflection. I am not afraid of what other's might think about those choices. Changes like the ones Father X raised the possibility of today are always raised a means of reaching out to the modern age, and to young people. I am not afraid of youthful ignorance; they'll outgrow it. I know that young people naturally test and probe things and that they ultimately respect those who stand proud. If they value courage in the face of adversity - and assuredly most of them do, they will secretly despise appeasers. I would very much like advice from those in the know about how conflicts like this play out. Are the Canadian Bishops really as out of touch with Rome as it was made to sound? Can the Parish Council keep Father X at bay?

Repeat the question, please?

2005-12-08T09:39:00.000-08:00

Richard Dawkins is interviewed on Belief.net and is asked:

You criticize intelligent design, saying that "the theistic answer" - pointing to God as designer" is deeply unsatisfying"--presumably you mean on a logical, scientific level.

His answer is:

Yes, because it doesn't explain where the designer comes from. If they're going to emphasize the statistical improbability of biological organs - "these are so complicated, how could they have evolved?" - well, if they're so complicated, how could they possibly have been designed? Because the designer would have to be even more complicated.

As intelligent as he is - and I don't dispute it - Dawkins is a crummy theologian. His response is an anthropomorphic projection. I can only see, hear, and think just so, and everything must fit into those neat little slots. But those mental slots, by Dawkin's own account, did not evolve with the the pursuit of scientific truth in mind. Is it so hard to see that when we say that God is the source of all that is, that this means that God is a different sort of thing than what he's made? We can go around in circles on this question forever: Who made God? Who made the universe? We both answer "they have always been" and neither answer has positive proof to back it up. The proofs are theoretical and logical and rely on the acceptance of their premises to reach their conclusions. Dawkins has chosen not to accept certain premises. Bully for him. Does he need to mock those who have chosen differently as being illogical? Dawkins in fact reminds me a tad of Lewis in the sense that they are both very much products of their upbringing and social circumstances and it seem that nothing can penetrate that tightly sealed hermetic shell. Lewis retained Ulster in his soul to the end, and Dawkins is the very model of a certain sort of Empiricist Englishman, unchanged and unmoved in his methodology by anything that has happened since, say, 1905. But maybe there is hope. This exchange was better:

Is atheism the logical extension of believing in evolution? They clearly can't be irrevocably linked because a very large number of theologians believe in evolution. In fact, any respectable theologian of the Catholic or Anglican or any other sensible church believes in evolution. Similarly, a very large number of evolutionary scientists are also religious. My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.

Unless, of course, he means that he understands evolution and those who disagree do not. Sadly, in this case the tautology seems more likley. Tautology? See here or here.

Exmas and Chrissmas

2005-12-07T18:21:00.000-08:00

How are your Advent preparations going? If you're feeling under the gun, the Bishop of Denver's recent column might be just the thing. In it, he shares from a C.S. Lewis essay on the the festivals of Exmas and Chrissmas. Lewis himself is merely sharing a lost chapter from Herodotus on the customs of a strange land called Niatirb. Of Niatirb, "Herodotus" writes that:

In the middle of winter when fogs and rains most abound, (the Niatirbians) have a great festival called Exmas, and for 50 days they prepare for it (in the manner which is called,) in their barbarian speech, the Exmas Rush. When the day of the festival comes, most of the citizens, being exhausted from the (frenzies of the) Rush, lie in bed till noon. But in the evening they eat five times as much as on other days, and crowning themselves with crowns of paper, they become intoxicated. And on the day after Exmas, they are very grave, being internally disordered by the supper and the drinking and the reckoning of how much they have spent on gifts and on the wine. (Now a) few among the Niatirbians have also a festival, separate and to themselves, called Crissmas, which is on the same day as Exmas...

Niatirb? Lewis is writing about Britain, of course.

Superficial pluralism

2005-12-07T12:55:00.000-08:00

Ladies and gentlemen, Notre Dame professor John Haldane, interviewed in Mercator.net:

Haldane:There are two kinds of pluralism that we find today in Western countries. One is a lifestyle pluralism, a variety of ways of living. That can be quite superficial, simply like cakes, clothing or furniture or whatever. And there is a deeper diversity or plurality, a pluralism of philosophies or ideologies... So if you take, marriage, for example, Jews, Christians and Muslims tend actually to share, broadly speaking, the same views about this. The diversity comes among people who don’t have an ideology... But these are really not expressions of deep philosophies. These are expressions of consumerism, of the desire to have more choices. Serrano: What would you like to see? Haldane: I think that two things need to be done. One is the need to make a negative critique of superficial pluralism. We should be ready to show that although there is a great deal of diversity there, it doesn’t reveal deep philosophy, it’s rather shallow. That’s the negative side. And then the positive side is that the advocates of deep ideologies —- and these days, the only deep ideologies tend to be religious, because Marxism has gone -- need to work together to think about what exactly they share. ... We have to create a thoroughgoing, extensive and perceptive and rhetorically effective critique of the superficiality of consumer choice in society. And at the same time we have to try to among ourselves to develop a coherent, deeper account of how you might try to think about things like the human life, human reproduction, death and so on. ... It’s not so much that we need to do more philosophy. I think we need to recover a more natural and simpler style of explanation, less scholastic, less technical, more natural. Also we need to promote that in effective rhetorical modes, using imagination, examples, illustrating, rather than just giving people arguments. That’s why I think things like films, journalism, novels, music are much more important in our world. That’s where people are,

New York, New York

2005-12-07T09:24:00.000-08:00

New York Magazine features two informative stories about abortion. The first is a history of the procedure in that state and the second is a look at a program for hosting out of staters who come to the city for late term procedures. In the second story, about those who provide a 'haven' for those seeking late term abortion, we read the following:

Most Haven hosts are white, Jewish, well schooled, and political. Some are empty-nesters with beds to spare and memories of the sixties and seventies women's movement; many are young idealists with matchbox apartments and roommates who don't mind an extra body crashing in the living room. Meanwhile, most of the women helped by Haven are black and Latina, with GEDs or less, low literacy skills, and not much civic moxie. The two sides often baffle each other. Guests have been known to giggle at the gay-oriented titles on a host's bookshelves, complain about the the uncool quality of her CDs, and demand to take cabs rather than the subway because, they think, that is what New Yorkers do. Some exhibit a shocking obliviousness to the situation they're in: On the night between the first and second stages of her abortion, one patient told her host that she wanted to go out dancing until 2 a.m. "Plus, they all arrive with huge suitcases," says Haven member Judith Levine. "Before we went back to the clinic, one woman took an hour to do her hair and makeup. She even had a curling iron." Of course, the Haven members have their own preconceptions and idiosyncrasies. New hosts often fear that their houseguests will steal from them. (In the history of Haven, there has never been a reported theft.) And some Havenites insist that their guests eat "healthy" food - fresh fish, for instance, or vegetarian - even if they ask for Big Macs and Ding Dongs. Levine worries that she won't know how to talk to her guests. "I think my nervousness is about the class difference," she says. Katha Pollitt, the poet and Nation columnist, buys People magazine when she knows she's about to be called up for Haven duty. "But then I worry: Maybe that's patronizing. Maybe they'd rather read The Nicomachean Ethics." Sometimes, bridging the divide is just impossible: One patient walked into a volunteer's home, looked around, said she was going out for a smoke, and never came back. ... The worst story is really no story at all. The first woman Levine ever hosted was here having a late-term abortion because she had simply "put off" dealing with her pregnancy until it was almost too late. The delay certainly didn't seem to be for financial reasons: "She had a late-model pickup truck that was better than my car," remembers Levine, "and I wondered, Why am I the one paying for dinner?" Levine rolled out the red carpet anyway. "I had to tell myself, 'Every abortion is the choice of the woman having the abortion. This is about somebody else's body. It's not President Bush's body, but it's not mine, either,' " she says. "Being pro-choice is a morality that takes you morally out of the picture."

The author of the article is a Haven member but she's not at all convincing in making the case that what she and the others are doing is noble. He description of the guests seems to blow up the choicers cry that these decisions are always carefully considered. In fact that assumption seems to be just so much projection. These New Yorkers can't imagine the poor choices that have led to this situation and when they do begin to see it, they "remove themselves from the picture." How do they square this with the common left complaint that "the personal is the political?" Don't ask. There are two more unspoken assumptions and that is that adoption is not an option, and no child could ever overcome a problematic home life. It's not exactly a culture of hope they're offering.

Scruton

2005-12-06T15:56:00.000-08:00

Right Reason has an interview with Roger Scruton in two parts, here and here. What are you waiting for? Quote:

The problem for conservatism is to reconcile the many and often conflicting demands that these various forms of life impose on us. The free-market ideologues take one instance of spontaneous order, and erect it into a prescription for all the others. They ask us to believe that the free exchange of commodities is the model for all social interaction. But many of our most important forms of life involve withdrawing what we value from the market: sexual morality is an obvious instance, city planning another. (America has failed abysmally in both those respects, of course.) Looked at from the anthropological point of view religion can be seen as an elaborate (and spontaneous) way in which communities remove what is most precious to them (i.e. all that concerns the creation and reproduction of community) from the erosion of the market. A cultural conservative, such as I am, supports that enterprise. I would put the point in terms that echo Burke and Chesterton: the free market provides the optimal solution to the competition among the living for scarce resources; but when applied to the goods in which the dead and the unborn have an interest (sex, for instance) it wastes what must be saved.

The flickering sign of freedom

2005-12-05T15:25:00.000-08:00

vs. The beacon on a hill This is the third in a three part series of posts stemming from a reflection on human nature in light of the Cross. Part one is here and part two is here.

If you got past my wandering introduction in part two and read Pope Ratzinger's description of the Church you might have been surprised by his frank admission that the Church itself is NOT a beacon on a hill:

The thrilling interplay of God's loyalty and man's disloyalty that characterizes the structure of the Church is the dramatic form of grace, so to speak... One could say that precisely in her paradoxical combination of holiness and and unholiness the Church is in fact the shape taken by grace in this world.

The Pope admits that some view such an existence as "sickly" but reflection reveals its promise.

Ratzinger describes a Church that is not a clear instance of the divine in the world. The Church that he describes is a representation of man's relationship to God. Those will be important words here: representation and relationship. Why a representation of a relationship and not the divine thing in itself? Christ himself was not the powerful warrior king that the Jews had expected. His earthly incarnation was instead the perfect, intimate relationship between man and God. He was a model and example of what the Jewish Law pointed to, and not a coercive force policing it. Still, why take that route instead of something befitting his full might - and human expectation? Why make it hard for us to see? The question of Divine Hiddeness cannot be understood without relation to freedom. Freedom, in fact, is predicated on the God and his moral law being elusive to us. Writing about Immanuel Kant's ethics, Roger Scruton writes:

the existence of God and the immortality of the soul cannot be proved as theoretical judgements [ie. positive science] since it lies beyond the power of the human understanding to conceive or conjecture them. Nevertheless, when acting in obedience to the moral law we know these things not as truths, but in some other way... these feelings of familiarity, **forced on us by the very perception of the moral order**, cannot be translated into the language of scientific judgement.

Kant's distinction between the types of knowledge is fair but I recognize that we need to act on what we have, even if fragmentary. The representational nature of God's incarnation and of the Church's struggles show a respect human freedom that can be a model for legislators. The images do not force themselves on us but are only provocative, and evocative. The "freedom" we chose in Genesis, and carry still, is not threatened. There, the serpent said "You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." The word "die" here is used in a literal, minimalist sense and our ancestors buy into the lie. It is their Nature (Platonic essence) that dies, not their physical selves. It is this new Nature, freely chosen, that has the problematic relationship with Divinity and the moral law. God's rescue of us from this situation will likewise need to be freely accepted. It's important that I not be understood to be saying that the incarnation is only myth and only representative. No; Christ is real, and the incarnation is historical, but the choice of a carpenter in Judea is symbolic. The Church, likewise, is symbolic, and symbols are inherently relational ("dialectic"). They are never the thing in itself but pointers to it. As this primer on Immanuel Kant puts it:

description or representation [is] problematic, as it always relies on the absence of what it appears to represent. The paradox of metaphysical philosophies is that they depend upon the possibility of representing Being and claiming to the right to make such representations. Yet, from a logical point of view, the notion of representation cannot be reconciled with an absolute Being. If the absolute exits, it exits absolutely, outside the dialectic of presence and absence.

This describes the nature of representation pretty well but I am not convinced that it is a problem. Of course the images of God that we have are only symbols pointing elsewhere, and that holds true for textual descriptions as well! The ancient Jews were under no mistake about that, forbidding symbols and even the pronunciation of God's name. Christians have fought over how to handle symbols and statues but I see no problem with them provided that we are mindful of their nature as pointers. If, however, the Church is only a pointer to God, and not a beacon of divinity, what is its significance? Why go, and why listen to what it has to say? Because while it is not the divine thing in itself, the thing in itself can be found there. Ratzinger writes:

The essential form of Christian worship is rightly called Eucharista, thanksgiving. In this form of worship human achievements are not placed before God; on the contrary, it consists in man's letting himself be endowed with gifts; we do not glorify God by supposedly giving to him out of our resources - as if they were not his already! - but by letting ourselves be endowed with his own gifts and thus recognizing him as Lord. We worship him by dropping the fiction of a realm in which we could face him as independent business partners, whereas in truth we can only exist at all in him and from him. Christian sacrifice does not consist in giving of what God would not have without us but in our becoming totally receptive and letting ourselves be completely taken over by him.

Unlike a statue or a painting, the Eucharist is not simply a pointer. Like all of the sacraments it IS the thing it represents, and of them all it is the greatest because it takes that moment of revelation with which I started this series (the crucifixion "Behold the man!") and presents it to us here and now. It is THE sign of change and it is as gentle as can be. Reformers, revolutionaries, and legislators take note.

Libertine literalism and Liberals

2005-12-04T17:57:00.000-08:00

Biblical Literalism is usually associated with so called "conservative" fundamentalism. There is, however, nothing inherently conservative about literalism. In fact this story about a youth group in Germany producing a sexy calendar is proof that literalism is an extreme and radical reading method that can have results that range from fundamentalism to libertinism.

Anne Rohmer, 21, wearing garters and stockings, posed on a doorstep as the prostitute Rahab. "We wanted to represent the Bible in a different way and to interest young people," she told news agency Reuters. "Anyway, it doesn't say anywhere in the Bible that you are forbidden to show yourself nude."

Miss Rohmer is skirting the following (and there might be more):

Exodus 20:14: "You shall not commit adultery." Mathew 5:17: "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven..." Mathew 5:27: "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart." Mathew 22:39: "love your neighbor as yourself." ie. Do not needlessly tempt him to break a commandment.

Rohmer's right in a very simple sense; posing nude is not verboten in black and white letters. It's in the spirit of the thing that any sensible person can see she's mistaken. Mathew 5:27 in particular is a near total contradiction of her claim in the eyes of a reasonable person. My main point however is that literalists are extremist by their very nature. They want to either go above and beyond what is required, or they want to do the bare minimum, quite literally. Most of us rightly reject fundamentalist literalism but few seem to be aware that we live in age of liberal literalism, and this plays itself out in many ways, including in our courts and legislatures. Legal minimalism does not give us more freedom from the law; it simply creates a demand for more law. The recent Knights of Columbus case I've posted about is but one example of this "black and white" minimalist approach to the law creating havoc with people's expectations of the law and what a creative jurist might do with it.

The not so secret agent

2005-12-04T14:56:00.000-08:00

This follow up post is a little late. I had hoped to have it up last night, but as usual I underestimated my subject and this will now be the second of a three part series. Part One is here.

Yesterday I posted about the Cross as profound light shed on the nature of humanity, and I wrote that the light it sheds serves as a warning to those who think they can effect a liberation of humanity through reform and expansion of the law. That school of thought is called "positive liberty" and it crashes against man's failure to know in the fullest sense what the good is, and into the consistent failure to adhere to even what he does know. Negative liberty, freedom from unnecessary and unenlightened law, is better but does not entirely escape the need for an Authoritative Criterion for just action either. Negative liberty has the virtue of restricting the damage that government can do by restricting the number and scope of its powers. We are, however, still left with problems that can't be casually dismissed as small stuff. Smaller scale human problems are in no way "small" when they afflict you. The abuse of minor powers, such as those wielded by neighbors, family members, merchants, and so on can cause serious misery. In addition to these "man vs. man" problems we also have problems with nature - natural disasters, disease, and aging among them. There is little doubt that natural disasters are of a scope that we naturally expect governments to deal with them. On how to deal with disease and aging there can be differences of opinion. Where do we turn for the solid ground that we need in order to even begin to discuss our differences, having shown that our human resources are not up to the task? How do we attempt to minimize the abuse of minor powers without being careless in drawing in larger human powers prone to the very same sorts of abuse they were created to rectify? These are questions of Authority. The issue is greatly complicated by the fact that we are social creatures and we must live in close contact with one another. It is not enough to "get right with" the world or with God as an individual. We have to get our relationships right and we need to do it with others who may not reciprocate our efforts. We ourselves can fail to get it right despite good intentions. The excerpt from Pope Ratzinger yesterday said: "In the abyss of human failure is revealed the still more inexhaustible abyss of divine love." So, in the midst of all this human failure, large and small, where is God, the unmoved mover of good and right? Is there no sign of Him that we can turn to? We have the Bible but it seems that no two people can read that and come to the same conclusions about what it means, either symbolically or practically. And the Churches? I can hear the sucking in of breath at the mere mention of that! Nevertheless, I do think the Church is, as it claims, the place to look for an anchor in faith and morality, and that those things are the keys to understanding relationships large and small. Two problems raise themselves up right away. Which church are we talking about, and how can it be THE one church given all the scandal in it (regardless of which one you pick)? Anyone who reads this site regularly knows that I think this Church is the Catholic Church but it's not my intention to dwell on that particular issue. Briefly, John Henry Cardinal Newman, a famous Anglican convert, gives an idea of why I attend where I do:

consider the vast difference between believing in a living authority, unerring because divine, in matters of doctrine, and believing none; - between believing what an external authority defines, and believing what we ourselves happen to define as contained in Scripture and the Fathers, where no two individuals define quite the same set of doctrines; between believing a creed, which, as far as such definitions go, is ever increasing, and believing the letter of Creeds which we may expand and explain for ourselves. In the one case, the living authority, deciding in controversies of faith, is the Church, in the other (whatever men pretend,) it is we ourselves who are the ultimate authority.

This is taken from Pontifications, where they are running a number of Newman excerpts at the moment. All of this so far has merely been an introduction to Pope Ratzinger's exposition of the Creed's "One, Holy, Catholic Church" , taken from his book, Introduction to Christianity. His explanation may not be what you expect:

We are tempted to say, if we are honest with ourselves, that Church is neither holy nor Catholic... The one garment of the Lord is torn between the disputing parties, the one Church divided up into many Churches, every one of which claims more or less insistently to be alone in the right. And so for many people today the Church has become the main obstacle to belief. They can no longer see in her anything but the human struggle for power, the petty spectacle of those who, with their claim to administer official Christianity, seem to stand most in the way of the true spirit of Christianity. There is no theory in existence that could compellingly refute such ideas by mere reason, just as, these ideas themselves do not proceed from reason but from the bitterness of heart that may perhaps have been disappointed in its high hopes and now, in the pain of wronged love, can see only the destruction of its hopes. How, then, are we to reply? Ultimately one can only acknowledge why can still love Church in faith, why one still dares to recognize in the distorted features the countenance of the holy Church. Nevertheless, let us start from the objective elements... The word "holy" does not apply in the first place to the holiness of human person but refers to the divine gift that bestows holiness in the midst of human unholiness. The Church is not called "holy" in the Creed because her members, collectively and individually, are holy, sinless men - this dream, which appears afresh in every century, has no place in the waking world of our text, however movingly it may express a human longing that man will never abandon until a new heaven and a new earth really grant him what this age will never give him. Even at this point we can say that the sharpest critics of the Church in our time secretly live on this dream and, when they find it disappointed, bang the door of the house shut again and denounce it as a deceit. But to return to our argument: The holiness of the Church consists in that power of sanctification which God exerts in her in spite of human sinfulness. We come up here against the real mark of the "New Covenant": in Christ, God has bound himself to men, has let himself be bound by them. The New Covenant no longer rests on the reciprocal keeping of the agreement; it is granted by God as grace that that abides even in the face of man's faithlessness. It is the expression of God's love, which will not let itself be defeated by man's incapacity but always remains well disposed to him, welcomes him again and again precisely because he is sinful, turn to him, sanctifies him, and loves him.... The Lord.. becomes present in her [the Church]... and chooses again and again as the vessel of Its presence - with a paradoxical love - the dirty hands of men... So the paradoxical figure of the Church, in which the divine so often presents itself in such unworthy hands, in which the divine is only ever present in the form of a "nevertheless", is to the faithful the sign of the "nevertheless" of the greater love shown by God. The thrilling interplay of God's loyalty and man's disloyalty that characterizes the structure of the Church is the dramatic form of grace, so to speak... One could say that precisely in her paradoxical combination of holiness and and unholiness the Church is in fact the shape taken by grace in this world. ... [God] has drawn drawn sin to himself, made it his lot, and so revealed what true "holiness" is: not separation, but union; not judgement, but redeeming love... People may well say that such words express a sickly existence - but it is part of being a Christian to accept the impossibility of autonomy and the weakness of one's own resources... rancorous bitterness [against the Church arises when] she is only regarded as a political instrument...

I will have more to say about the strange nature of this open but hidden sign in part three. Francis in his comment on part one of this little series was headed in the right direction and his post (the last part) is worth your time.

Mirror of the just man

2005-12-03T11:18:00.000-08:00

Ecce Homo I haven't done a quote from Pope Ratzinger's Introduction to Chistianty in a while and even though I have finished the book there are still one or two passages I want to share, including - perhaps even especially - this one. When I first began to look over what Christianity teaches, to look at the gospel story and to try penetrate why it has been so compelling to so many for so long, this was one of the things that leapt out at me. I was happy to see our Pope confirm it. Expanding on the Apostles Creed where it says "... suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried," Ratzinger writes:

The fact that when the perfectly just man appeared he was crucified, delivered up by justice to death, tells us pitilessly who man is: Thou art such, man, that thou canst not bear the just man - that he who simply loves becomes a fool, a scourged criminal, an outcast. Thou art such because, unjust thyself, thou dost always need the injustice of the next man in order to feel excused and thus cannot tolerate the just man who seems to rob thee of this excuse. Such art thou. St John summarized all this in the Ecce Homo ("Look, this is [the] man!" of Pilate, which means quite fundamentally: this is how it is with man; this is man. The truth of man is his complete lack of truth. The sayings in the Pslam that every man is a liar (Ps 116 [115]: 11) and lives in some way or other against the truth already reveals how it really is with man. The truth about man is that he is continually assailing the truth; the just man crucified is thus a mirror held up to man in which he sees himself unadorned. But the Cross does not reveal only man; it also reveals God. God is such that he identifies himself with man right down into the abyss and that he judges him and saves him. In the abyss of human failure is revealed the still more inexhaustible abyss of divine love. The Cross is thus truly the center of revelation, a revelation that does not reveal any previously unknown principle but reveals us to ourselves by revealing us before God and God in our midst.

I think this is a very profound insight into what it means to be human. The Pope points out just before this passage that Plato, in his Republic, writes a something quite similar. See The Republic, book 2, 361e. "Justice in the State and the Individual." I cannot let this passage go without discussing the ideas of negative and positive liberty. Positive liberty is the belief that people need certain things in order to be free, in order to fulfill their potential. It is a view that is seems to draw on naturalistic and mechanical impression of human life. If it allows for spirit at all, it does so in a secondary sort of way. The human soul can do no more than deal with the material circumstances it finds itself in. To ensure that humans society flourishes it puts forward that various levels of goods need to be distributed and that this distribution cannot be left to chance. It suggests, in other words, that an Agent is needed to fulfill the role of just distributor and invariably the Agent chosen is large scale government - national governments, the UN, that sort of thing. Many, many Christians subscribe to this line of reasoning. If Ratzinger is correct, however, how can this be right? Human governments are made up of human agents, who are, we are told, "continually assailing the truth." I think these points of view are irreconcilable. Government has legitimate functions, but addressing issues as large as these is not among them. Giving large, sweeping powers to governments made of men as John describes them is a recipe for disaster. Witness the US Oil for Food program and countless scandals large and small. I have always favoured negative liberty, in which freedom in is considered to be freedom from unjust and unnecessary human obstacles. It contains in it the idea that human laws are prone to abuse and must be regarded with wary suspicion. It is compatible with idea of human fallibility. This is not to say that there is no need for people (in the form of government) to step in a take steps to prevent the strong from abusing the weak. Those are legitimate but when we search for solutions to problems we begin from the small and the local. When we refrain from jumping to the phrase "systemic prejudice" at every turn, we avoid needlessly giving huge, sweeping powers to the government. The powers we do grant can be abused but, being small and local, will provide less scope for the grossest sorts of abuse. That is what I think Ecce Homo tells us about human governance. There is still the question of how we are to know at what level a problem should be dealt with, and how we can attempt to minimize the need to appeal to human authority at all. For that I want to bring in another passage from Ratzinger but it will have to wait until later today.

How much for bruised feelings?

2005-12-03T09:09:00.000-08:00

Let it Bleed offers analysis of the recent Kinghts of Columbus versus the gay crusaders (in small caps!) trial:

A couple of items to note: the panel acknowledges that the complainants were publicity hungry (para. 31: one of the first things they did was type a letter and then send it to "the media"), and seems to acknowledge that the complainants aren't terribly bright:
"There is no question that these items ["the crucifix, a picture of the ascension of the Virgin Mary, a picture of the Pope and pictures of the leaders of the Knights"] were displayed in the Hall. However, the Panel accepts the evidence of the complainants that they did not take notice of these items. ... Even if the complainants had noticed those items, the Panel is not persuaded that they would have made the connection between them, the Knights, and the fact that the Hall was a building with religious significance that may have had restrictions as to the types of events that could take place there." [emphasis added] (para. 83)
Laughably (well, not really, but what else can you do?) the Court awarded $1,000 to each of the complainants "for injury to their dignity, feelings and self-respect" (para. 151). What's pathetic is that the panel is not able, even once, to identify the actions which lead to these supposed injuries. There is absolutely no enumeration of what the Knights actually did to injure the complainants. Other than a reference at para. 42 to one of the complainants feeling "that their comments were offensive" (which "comments" these are is never explained), and noting that the Knights didn't offer a written apology (although everyone agreed that multiple verbal apologies were offered), it's unclear what the Knights did wrong.

The panel's reasoning on other issues is just as lame and contradictory. They essentially fault the Knights for not doing something they are forbidden to do: restrict access to their premises to people who share their faith (see paras. 70-78). It's not even clear how the Knights could do this: what are they gonna do, make people present their laminated "I'm a Catholic" certificate? Nevertheless, the fact that the Knights don't "screen" people who enter their premises is used as a argument against the Knights being able to restrict activities that conflict with their core religious beliefs.

Return to the Mushroom Kingdom

2005-12-01T17:15:00.000-08:00

If you're of a certain age, like me, the first few notes of this Google video will bring back memories pretty quick. Good times... good times... If you're younger or older you'll just be befuddled. Keep moving, nothing to see here.